PrestaShop CDN integration helps, substantially improve page loading speed and SEO rankings, minimize costs and maximize website profitability.

If you’re in the e-commerce business, then you probably know just how significant customer experience is. Apart from the modern design, intuitive user interface and convenient billing options, clients want websites that load fast, work flawlessly 24/7 and are always online.

While a small, local store might not experience any issues, as the number of items and categories start to grow, the pressure on the host server increases simultaneously. This will inevitably lead to slow page loading speed, mismanagement of digital content and even server crashes. Combined, these factors will negatively influence customer retention and acquisition rate, and the brand’s online reputation.

This is where the powerful combination of CMS and CDN can help.

What is a CMS?

A CMS is a software application (or a group of programs) that is used to produce, add, remove and manage digital content on your website. The user-friendly architecture allows any business owner to seamlessly post and monitor various types of content – product descriptions, images and videos, user reviews, marketing materials, etc. – without any technical knowledge or skills.

Also, it enables a ton of convenience for customers, allowing them to navigate your website via search terms, keywords, authors and publication dates. Furthermore, the software tracks and stores users’ browsing information. This data includes shopping behavior and interests (what items they are interested in, how much time did they spent on a given page, what kind of lifestyle they have, etc.), which can be used to tailor marketing campaigns and offers that customers will find hard to refuse.

For instance, if a user has searched for “60”, smart, 4K TVs”, their suggestions will include items related to their search term, rather than generic “electronics” or completely irrelevant “women’s clothing”. This aspect makes CMS a powerful one-to-one marketing tool.

What Makes PrestaShop a Good Choice?

PrestaShop is one of the market’s leading CMS platforms and is commonly referred to as “a freemium business.” It’s a free, highly reliable open source piece of software operating under the OSL (Open Software License) with 24/7 support, free domain names and shared SSL, affiliate programs, cross-selling and special promotional deals.

What really sets PrestaShop apart from other great CMS platforms like Magento, Drupal and Shopify though is its impressive list of built-in features. The tool covers all of the basics that you need to start an online business and offers over 500 built-in features for various occasions. In just a couple of years after its release, the software has gathered an active community with over 100.000 members, achieved five million downloads and over 250.000 websites operating on PrestaShop worldwide.

Here are some more facts about PrestaShop:

Fast and Light

The search modules of the CMS are extremely well-built, allowing users to quickly and effortlessly find and access the files they need. Also, the platform is blazing fast, meaning that it won’t slow down your website.

SEO-friendly

When you’re selling a large variety of products, organic search becomes an essential factor to generate more leads and increase sales. PrestaShop is optimized for Yahoo and Google search and offers features like keyword tags, product descriptions and categories, customizable URLs.

Numerous Themes

Even the least tech-savvy users can quickly set up their site by using one of the many pre-made website themes. The themes have in-depth categories, extensions and responsive, customizable templates.

Mobile-friendly

Nowadays, mobile devices are the number one choice for customers to visit and browse a website. Thanks to the responsive templates, your shop will look great on mobile devices and provide all the convenience buyers need, without a dedicated mobile app.

Inventory tracking

When dealing with numerous products on a daily basis, it’s easy to oversell a product and only later realize that you don’t have any left in your warehouse. This can result in negative customer experience and reduce sales. The inventory tracking feature allows to keep an eye on your items and avoid such situations.

How PrestaShop CDN Integration Can Improve Your Sales

Many e-commerce stores have become globally available, enabling them to boost sales significantly. However, with opportunity comes risk. While anyone in the world can visit your website, it is located on a single server and can’t effectively handle multiple simultaneous requests effectively. As the number of users, along with the geographical gap between them and the server increases, things start to get progressively worse.

For example, if your store is hosted on a server in California, you’ll have no problems serving customers who visit from the US. However, for a visitor from Europe, Australia and Asia, your content – images, videos and text – needs to travel a lot of distance and will load a lot slower as a result. This will decrease user satisfaction, which is a crucial metric for customer retention. Moreover, as the numbers increase, the queue times become even longer and can cause server crashes in some instances.

This is exactly why a proper CDN is essential.

A CDN is comprised of numerous servers – also known as points of presence (PoPs) – scattered around the globe, designed to cache and store a copy of all the static and dynamic content on your website. When a request is received, these servers quickly identify the location of the visitor and load the content from a location closest to them, allowing you to maintain under two-second page loading times.

Moreover, since your website is available on numerous servers at once, you will never face any issues with uptime. Even if one server crashes, another one will quickly step in its place and load the content. PrestaShop CDN integration is beneficial on multiple fronts, but most importantly, it allows to deliver the content that visitors seek nice and smooth, without any issues.

CDNsun and PrestaShop CDN Integration

CDNsun was founded with the mission to deliver high quality, affordable and reliable CDN services to everyone around the world. We have been helping clients improve their website performance since 2012.

Equipped with the latest generation SSD drives, our network of over 50 PoPs is scattered around North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania, allowing you to deliver an exceptional experience to any user around the globe.

Thanks to the unique architecture, the PrestaShop CDN integration is very easy to perform. Here is a short, step-by-step guideline on how to do it. If you run into any issues, don’t hesitate to contact our 24/7 customer support, who will be happy to assist you with any queries, completely free of charge.