Ecommerce Optimization for Ceramiche Civita Castellana

Tecnoacquisti.com
E-commerce Portfolio

Tecnoacquisti.com optimized and updated thePrestaShop ecommerce of ceramiche-civitacastellana.com, starting with correcting several database referential integrity issues due to errors during the migration from Magento to PrestaShop previously performed by another agency.

Intervention on PrestaShop slow

Ceramiche Civita Castellana was extremely slow with a TTFB that often exceeded 900ms, the server response time worsened in category pages, denoting a problem in the structure of the ecommerce as well as on the hosting side where support for HTTP/2 protocol and GZIP compression was lacking.

This problem was being detected by Google Search Console and was greatly impacting Web Vitals metrics. The situation degraded significantly as concurrent accesses to the ecommerce increased as evidenced by benchmarking with siege where very low values were recorded with 232hits vs. 1391 actuals and a response time of 3.71s vs. 0.70s actuals.

Benchmark Siege 50 users before intervention

Benchmark Siege 50 users after intervention

Preliminary tests highlighted the need to migrate PrestaShop to our own hosting solution, following the migration the server response time improved dramatically to less than 700ms, but still too high by our standards, despite hosting-side optimization with HTTP/2 support and GZIP compression got the ecommerce back into the Web Vitals metrics.

Analysis of the server logs revealed database integrity issues, a problem similar to issues #22215 in that during migration from Magento the vat_number and dni fields had been set to NULL value, a simple manual fix and optimization of the database resolved the problem.

The WareHouse template had several changes made directly in the "core" from the previous agency without the use as recommended of a Child theme to allow easy updating of the template and PrestaShop. The changes were implemented sub-optimally and generated JS errors in the front-end and several small problems, it was also necessary to upgrade PrestaShop to a newer version being the one in use affected by several bugs and security issues, it was therefore decided with the occasion to create an optimized Child theme to make the ecommerce more responsive and compatible with various browsers.

PrestaShop optimization result

The end result of the optimization saw improvement in all metrics, the TTFB dropped below 100ms on average (Google recommends not to exceed 800ms), all Web Vitals metrics are met, and the site's Fully Loaded Time went from 3.1s to 972ms, below 1s. All warnings in Experience on Google Search Console pages have returned the improvement was remarkable for mobile devices.

Not only did the optimization make the user experience more rewarding by increasing conversions, but it led to improved SEO indexing; Zoom Autority (ZA) went from 38 to 44, it went from 3596 keywords including 591 on the first page in SERP to 5213 keywords including 855 on the first page.