This year's Christmas season was really tough for e-shops. It was anticipated that clients would buy less and for much smaller amounts. While last year, the average order value was around 2500 CZK, this year it is only about 500 CZK. It's not surprising given the extreme economic uncertainty.
We manage many client e-shops both technically and in terms of marketing, and these clients have given us permission to share their information. To cover their costs, e-shop operators took marketing promotion very seriously. They spent a quarter of a million CZK on Facebook promotions monthly and sent up to 10 million emails to both their own and third-party databases. They promoted through all channels on all fronts. The result was an extreme increase in traffic on both Shared hosting servers and VPS.
The average e-shop handles a maximum of about 2000 visits per day, and PrestaShop can easily handle this even on shared web hosting. But what happens when traffic increases to 15,000 visits per hour? Shared web hosting has no chance, and websites on a VPS server load slowly.
The solution is an immediate move to a more powerful environment and complete optimization of PrestaShop loading times. This Christmas, we moved clients to a managed VPS server with a configuration of 6x CPU, 12 GB RAM, and 40 GB HDD. The second part involved optimizing the PrestaShop code, reworking videos and images, setting up multi-level caching, and modifying modules and external resources. Typically, a sluggish PrestaShop with a loading time of 12-20 seconds was sped up to 1-3 seconds, which is significant. Faster loading times lead to a proportionate increase in the conversion rate.
Clients usually purchased the recommended VPS server configuration with management (1850 CZK/month), and we performed the PrestaShop loading optimization (8,000-36,000 CZK one-time fee). The entire process was typically completed by early November within a few days, saving the Christmas season.