Blog / PrestaShop Tips: Discover how to improve your online shop

PrestaShop Tips: Discover how to improve your online shop

by SW Team

PrestaShop is a popular e-commerce platform used to create and manage an online shop for free. It offers a variety of features and tools to customise your online shop. It also has a large community of developers who offer add-ons and extensions, which are called modules.

In this blog, we will explain different tips for your PrestaShop online stores. From how to optimize the loading speed of your website to how to increase sales and configure SEO for better search engine results, you will find what you need to take your eCommerce to the next level.

To improve user experience in PrestaShop

User experience is fundamental for the success of any online shop. If your customers don't enjoy browsing your website, they will probably never come back and leave with a bad impression of your business or brand. For this reason, here are some tips on how you can improve the user experience:

  • Use an attractive and user-friendly design: This is the key to capture the attention of your customers and keep them interested in your products. Use eye-catching colours, a clean design and, above all, a very intuitive navigation so that users can easily find what they are looking for.
  • Opt for minimalism: The checkout process should be as simple and streamlined as possible. Make sure that customers can add products to the shopping cart and pay without any problems or complications. Do not ask for unnecessary information and avoid long and overwhelming forms. You can do AB tests, create heat maps, etc.
  • Have coherence in the structure: It is essential that the design and colours used are uniform, consistent and in the same style throughout the platform. The content structure of your site should be clear and concise, with no confusing elements that may distract or disorientate the user. Remember that simplicity and consistency are the key to a good user experience.
  • Offer multiple payment options: For example, credit cards, PayPal or bank transfers so that your customers can choose the method that is most comfortable, and secure for them.
  • Add detailed product information: Provide full descriptions, detailed images, especially of high quality, and any other relevant information to enable the user to make an informed purchasing decision.
  • Be responsive: Nowadays, Internet access through mobile devices (smartphones or tablets) is becoming more and more common among users. For this reason, it is essential that your eCommerce has a responsive design that allows proper viewing and navigation on different devices.
  • Choose a good Hosting: PrestaShop needs a web server with PHP and MySQL to function. The performance of the shop depends on several factors, such as the server mode, the resources, the PHP version, the modules and the CMS itself. There are different types of servers, such as shared, VPS or dedicated, and each has different prices and features. It is important to evaluate which one best suits your needs and budget. In SW Hosting you have shared hosting and dedicated servers with MySQL, unlimited traffic, SSL included, latest versions of PHP and PrestaShop, among other factors that ensure the best performance for your eCommerce.

To increase sales in PrestaShop

Increasing sales is the main goal of any eCommerce. With PrestaShop, there are several ways to improve your sales and achieve success in your eCommerce. Here are some tips on how to achieve this:

  • Have a buyer persona: The buyer persona helps you to define your potential buyers and divide them according to their interests, age, location, information channels, job, etc. This way, you will be able to design sales strategies focused on each of your customers, and offer them exactly what they need.
  • Offer discounts and promotions: They are an excellent tool to attract new customers and keep the current customers interested in your products. In addition, you can send discount emails to customers who abandoned their shopping cart. This way, you can motivate them to complete the purchase and checkout process.
  • Use email: Email marketing is an effective tool for promoting products and keeping customers informed about new offers and products. In addition, a very effective technique to build customer loyalty is to email birthday greetings with gifts and time-limited discounts.
  • Optimise the Check Out module: To make the checkout process more efficient and agile in PrestaShop, it is advisable to optimise the Check Out module, as by default the customer has to complete several pages before finalising the purchase. For example, unify all the sections on a single page and divide it into different steps to facilitate the customer's shopping experience.
  • Offer free shipping: It’s a great tool to increase sales, especially to motivate customers who live far from your physical location, to buy your products. It is advisable to offer free shipping for purchases above a specific price to encourage much larger purchases.
  • Make the most of big data: The use of Big Data offers a great capacity for data and information analysis, which can help you understand what your audience is looking for. This way, you can offer the right product to the right customer at the right time, which can increase the opportunities for sales and loyalty.
  • Create product packages and a quality catalogue: An effective strategy is to create bundles of complementary products or products that are normally sold together and offer them at a reduced price to encourage customers to make additional purchases. Also, designing a digital catalogue with high quality images, detailed descriptions, product reviews, etc., this will increase the public's interest in your products.
  • Use Remarketing: Remarketing is a very effective technique for reaching customers who have visited your website but have not made a purchase. Through PrestaShop, you can design personalised ads for various platforms, with the aim of reminding customers to return to your online shop and complete the purchase process.
  • Add customer reviews and opinions: Customer opinions and reviews are essential to build trust in your products. For this reason, it is highly recommended to add the option for customers to leave their opinions and reviews on your website. In addition, it is important to answer to users' questions or concerns so they feel that their opinions are valued and listened to.
As you may already know, the main goal of any online shop is to increase sales and achieve e-commerce success. PrestaShop offers several ways to improve sales, from creating a buyer persona, offering discounts and promotions, to optimising the checkout process and using Big Data to better understand customer needs.  So, don't hesitate any longer and start implementing these improvements to increase your sales.

To optimise loading speed in PrestaShop

A slow website negatively affects the user experience, conversion rate and Google search engine rankings. PrestaShop offers several tools and techniques to optimise the loading speed of your shop. Here are some tips about how to optimise it:

  • Have a quality Hosting: It is essential to select a good hosting provider that offers high processing speed, good storage capacity and adequate bandwidth to handle the website traffic. For example, all SW Hosting's hosting services are optimised for websites to run at rocket speed, with ample bandwidth capacity and unlimited traffic.
  • Optimise .htaccess files: Before making any modifications, to avoid data loss, make sure you make a copy of the file before making any modifications, so you can revert the changes if errors occur. In addition, we recommend setting an expiry date on images, javascript, css and text in your online shop to improve loading speed and avoid storage saturation. Another way to optimise your shop is to compress it using the deflate method, which will reduce the size of the files and improve the loading speed.
  • Configure the performance: In the "Performance" section of the "Advanced settings" menu in the backend of your online shop, you can configure various options to improve performance. One of the options is to activate the cache, which allows you to temporarily store information and access it more quickly. In addition, you can take advantage of the CCC (Combine, Compress and Cache) options to combine, compress and cache your eCommerce CSS files and JavaScript. This not only reduces loading time, but also improves the user experience.
  • Optimise modules, images and code: Make sure that the modules you use are of high quality and updated. In addition, big and high-resolution images affect the loading speed of your shop. To avoid this, use tools such as Photoshop or GIMP to compress them and reduce their size without affecting the quality. Finally, if you have programming skills, review and optimise your shop's code, in order to eliminate unnecessary or redundant code.
With these tips you will be able to improve your online shop, and now we will share with you a good way to evaluate the loading speed of your shop. It is done with Gtmetrix, a tool that will allow you to identify problems in the optimisation of images, css and javascript, as well as other elements that may be affecting the loading speed. In case of detecting any element that needs optimisation, Gtmetrix will allow you to download the optimised file so that you can replace it with the original one in your online shop.

The best modules for PrestaShop

PrestaShop offers a wide variety of modules, both free and paid, that will help you improve the functionality of your online shop and offer a better shopping experience for your customers. Here are some of the best modules for PrestaShop:

  • PayPal: Through this module, you can offer various payment options during checkout, such as the use of credit or debit cards, and integration with PayPal. More and more users prefer to make their online purchases through this platform, so give them the opportunity to do so and avoid losing potential customers.
  • SEO Expert: This SEO module will allow you to add the necessary tags for Google to consider your content, such as meta titles, descriptions, keywords, and friendly URLs, etc. In this way, you will be able to optimise your website and improve its visibility in search results.
  • Social Login: To speed up the registration process on the website for your customers there is this module that allows your customers to connect with their Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook accounts. In addition, you will be able to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate.
  • Amazon Market Place: This module allows you to easily integrate your online shop with Amazon. Also, automates the creation of an account on the platform and allows you to centralise all your stock in one place.
  • Google Analytics: This module will allow you to measure the traffic on your online shop, identify the most visited products and analyse the origin of your visitors, as well as the devices they use to access your site. For this reason, it is important that you install this module.
  • Reminder of Abandoned Carts: Abandoned carts in your online shop negatively affect the conversion rate, leading to lost sales. To solve it effectively, you have to send automatic emails to customers who abandoned their cart, offering them incentives (discounts, promotions, etc.), which is achieved with this module. With it you can create personalised emails, design templates with your brand image, program the number of reminders and offer discounts to improve your chances of recovering those lost sales.
  • Verified Opinions: Product comments and reviews are a very valuable tool for attracting new customers and improving trust in your shop, which you can implement with this module.
  • European Cookies Law RGPD: This allows you to comply with the legal requirements of the GDPR in your online shop in an easy and efficient way. In addition, you can add responsive legal notices that include information about cookies and other aspects required by the European Cookie Law. In this way, you will ensure compliance with the regulations and avoid possible sanctions.
  • Tracking Center: With this module, you can easily integrate the services of around twenty international carriers into your online shop. The configuration is simple and almost automatic, which will save your time. It also offers the option of sending automatic order status tracking notifications via email, which will help you to keep your customers informed at all times.
  • Online Chat: This module allows visitors of an online shop to communicate in real time with a support agent. Users can ask questions, request information or help, and receive immediate answers. This improves the shopping experience and increases the chances of conversion.

Conclusion

PrestaShop is a very complete and easy to use e-commerce platform that offers numerous options to improve the user experience, increase sales and optimise the loading speed of your online shop.

Beyond the tips provided in this blog, it is important to consider implementing additional strategies and seeking professional advice to maximise the potential of your online shop and take your business to the next level. In addition, it is important to remember that SEO is essential for any website and online shop, as working meticulously on SEO will allow you to rank effectively on Google. By ranking well, you will be able to expand your audience and reach people who didn't know about you before.




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