Enable Smarty Template and File Caching

An easy way to improve the speed of your PrestaShop website is to disable Smarty compiling and enable caching. By default, Smarty recompiles template files every time they are requested, which is great when you are debugging the templates, but it slows down your website. Once you have finished debugging your templates, you should disable this feature so that Smarty templates are unnecessarily recompiled. To do this, go to the Preferences > Performance tab and change "Force compile" to "No" and also make sure "Cache" is set to "Yes". Smarty templates should then load instantly on your website since they have already been compiled and cached.

PrestaShop also has the option to cache files on another server.  Choose “Memcache” as the “Caching system” if you have the Memcache PECL extension installed on your server.  It is not installed by default in PHP, so you will most likely need to download it here and install it on your server or ask your host to install it for you.  You will get the following warning message until you do.  Click on the “Add server” link to add a new server and assign it a weight.

Alternatively, you can choose “File System” as the “Caching system”.  That will store a cache on your website.  You can also specify the directory depth of the cache.

PrestaTraining Videos

These training videos are provided courtesy of PrestaTraining.com, who make it easy to learn PrestaShop.