Keeping pages fast on a very large catalogue

The typical need

PrestaShop's standard performance settings — cache, compression, image optimisation — work well on a catalogue of ordinary size, but hit their limits on a very large one: filtered category pages become slow, search indexing takes a disproportionate amount of time, some admin operations slow down enough to get in the way of the team's daily work. At that point the problem is no longer configuration but the very structure of the underlying queries and indexes.

How I approach this kind of need

I start by measuring precisely where time is actually being lost, rather than optimising at random: the most expensive SQL queries on critical pages, generation time versus network time, cache behaviour on high-traffic pages. This measurement directs the effort towards what actually matters — on a large catalogue, the bottleneck is often not where intuition would place it.

The most common levers on this kind of catalogue are adding targeted indexes on the columns used by filters and sorting, reviewing the queries generated by modules that weren't designed for this kind of volume, and a finer-grained cache strategy than the default, especially on category pages with many possible filter combinations. Hosting choice matters too: a catalogue of this size generally benefits from an environment sized accordingly, with a properly configured database, rather than generic shared hosting.