PrestaShop media servers and performance optimization

The PrestaShop media server principle

In version 1.4, PrestaShop has worked to improve the performance of its CMS and, above all, to simplify the management of performance optimization.

So you'll find a Performance sub-tab in the Preferences tab.

This tab contains 5 sections:

• Smarty
• CCC (Concatenation, Compression and Caching)
• Media servers (only used when CCC is activated)
• Encryption
• Cache

In this article, we'll just look at the media server section.

Media servers and CDNs

PrestaShop media servers serve 2 purposes:

• Increase the number of files loaded in parallel
• Bringing content closer to your visitors

Number of files loaded

When the user calls up your site, the server delivers the files according to the limit set by the host during server configuration. So, the user will receive between 3 and 6 files simultaneously, in order to supply all the files in your store, of which there are well over a hundred.

The point of setting up media servers is to virtually increase this value by multiplying the number of supplier domains, and therefore the number of transfer sessions.

To do this, we'll look at two different methods.

Geodistribution

If you use a CDN, your data is distributed over several servers around the world, so the surfer receives the data from the server that's the quickest to reach, and therefore the one that's closest.

Using this technique requires a lot of investment, but the prices of a subscription with a large CDN (KeyCDN, etc.) are often too attractive, even for a small structure. It allows you to offer a fast site and, above all, to place less strain on your server structure, which may allow you not to migrate immediately to a larger server and, above all, to let the latter process the data rather than supply the media.

Using a CDN like KeyCDN is a real plus for managing your site and its availability, and PrestaShop version 1.4 lets you do it quickly and without any particular technical knowledge.

Parallélisation des fournisseurs

Setting up additional media providers makes it possible to load more data at the same time, as we said earlier.

The simplest solution is to create sub-domains pointing to your store, and the best solution is to create sub-domains or additional domains different from the main domain in order to get rid of cookies.

For example, if you're using the www.boutique.com domain, you can simply create three new sub-domains: cdn1.boutique.com, cdn2.boutique.com, cdn3.boutique.com. This will allow your server to come to these sub-domains to load media (js, css, images). But it's even better to have a second domain available, like www.boutique.biz, and create three sub-domains named cdn1.boutique.biz, cdn2.boutique.biz, cdn3.boutique.biz, which will prevent the boutique cookies from being applied and improve your PageSpeed or Yslow rating.