Web performance: How to unleash the full potential of your ecommerce site?

We had the opportunity to talk with Noël Peix Boisdon, Product Manager within the new PrestaShop Platform team, about the importance of the performance of ecommerce sites, the adapted solutions on the hosting and outsourcing side, and what the new PrestaShop service has to offer to ambitious merchants: PrestaShop Platform.

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1. We often hear about site performance, managed services and deployment: what exactly are we talking about and where does the PrestaShop Platform offer fit in?

The notions of outsourcing, deployment and performance, correspond to three subjects which are certainly linked, but which are finally very different from each other, and cover very varied aspects of the life of a website, with a very vast field of application.

With PrestaShop Platform, we want to address the needs of many aspects of each of these parties, but our offering is still in its infancy, and we will continue to expand it to address more issues related to performance topics.

2. What are the advantages for a merchant to optimize these different aspects of his ecommerce site? What impact on sales?

For that you have to read my last article! Web performance: why is it so important and how to optimize it? 

To summarize it here in a few words: the loading time of a page, the speed of a site and more generally what we will call the web performance of an online store, is a determining factor to convert visitors into customers. Very often, we see online merchants making a lot of effort to attract qualified prospects to their brand's website, only to lose them because the site is too slow to load.

We often hear that visitors to a website move on if it does not display in less than 3 seconds. An improvement of a few tenths of a second on the loading time of a page can increase the turnover considerably.

3. How can a merchant quickly know if his online store and hosting solution are up to his expectations 

From experience, it is often the marketing teams in charge of site conversion who alert their colleagues to problems with the site's performance in the broadest sense. KPIs may be lagging, and they're seeing a little too much bounce rate, abnormally high churn, that sort of thing. They are usually the first to start the analysis with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, Pingdom, GTMetrics, etc. and try to find the cause of a potential shortfall related to the store's technology or its hosting.

Prestashop Platform answers to performance issues on the infrastructure/hosting side but we also have our Pro Services team which intervenes on application issues, on a daily basis.

These two entities work together to audit the stores and propose a multitude of optimizations, in order to provide the merchant with a healthy working tool. Every second saved in loading is money earned by the merchant!

4. What types of merchants are affected?

If you are reading these lines, it is because the subject has caught your attention, and that you are surely concerned, from near or far. A merchant who starts to wonder about the loading speed of his ecommerce site, about the simultaneous visitors on his online store, is generally a merchant who has a strong ambition, a will to do better, and who is at the head of a company with strong growth stakes.

If your store has a large catalog, many customers and orders, or generates a large amount of data, then you are concerned by the issues covered by PrestaShop Platform.

5. What solutions are offered by PrestaShop?

In concrete terms, we are acting on two points. Firstly on the hosting, the infrastructure of our clients' sites, both on the hardware and software side, and secondly on the web interface which allows for simplified management and easy monitoring of site performance. Our other strength is also to be the best placed to solve problems that merchants may encounter on the application part of the store: who better than PrestaShop to solve the glitches of a PrestaShop site?

More precisely, our positioning is that of facilitating migrations from one environment to another, with the comfort for the merchant of not taking any risk during the implementation.

6. Which PrestaShop merchants can access these solutions?

Prestashop Platform meets several needs, as much for speed issues as for daily comfort issues. It is therefore a qualitative offer, integrating premium services with a very affordable entry-level price when you consider the gains made. Any merchant with the above-mentioned problems is concerned.

7. What is the cost of such a solution? When is it profitable?

Whether the investment required from the merchant is worth it or not will depend on where you put the cursor: our offer is aimed at merchants who are facing a problem, and who are looking for a solution to this problem. We are here to assist merchants who want more performance and for whom relations with the hosting companies have not resolved the problems they have experienced. The search for performance is our priority.

8. What are the 3 tips you would give to a merchant who wants to learn about their performance-related potential?

   1. Take some time to analyze the problems (slowness in front, in the back-office, in exchange with hosts etc.) with your teams.

   2. Define the importance of these issues by prioritizing them in your roadmap according to your own criteria (internal impact, customer, prospect, criticality, etc.)

   3. Contact us to discuss it, analysis done or not, the stakes are high and a feedback from the creator of your Open Source solution will always be useful.

Thank you Noël!