13 Best PrestaShop Hosting (2024): Free Themes & Support

Instead of all the expenses and restrictions with building a brick-and-mortar store, online services like the best PrestaShop hosting can empower entrepreneurs customize your store, attract customers, and make sales.

As a free and open-source eCommerce solution, PrestaShop serves more than 300,000 merchants globally — with an even larger community of developers ready and able to help you get started.

Read on for the PrestaShop web hosts that offer the savings, performance, scalability, and support that can help your business take off.

Best Overall | Free Themes | SSDs | Cloud | Managed

Anne-Charlotte compared PrestaShop to Legos because it enables entrepreneurs to build on as their companies expand. She and Co-Founder Nicolas Rohr spoke about Faguo’s omnichannel presence that now encompasses mobile, social media, and brick-and-mortar stores.

“We’re part of an ultra-connected generation, so it was really important to get our website up and running right from the start,” he said. “When we created Faguo about 10 years ago, you had to consider computers. Now, you have to consider smartphones.”

PrestaShop provides hundreds of responsive themes to serve mobile shoppers, who are expected to account for nearly 54% of all eCommerce sales by 2021. Once you customize your site’s design and configure payment and shipping methods, the platform provides countless features and modules to market and manage your store across a wide variety of channels.

“The idea is that customers can find the same information everywhere, wherever they go,” Anne-Charlotte said. “The idea was to be present and close to the community to be more transparent and bring to life Faguo’s entrepreneurial adventure as much as possible.”

As with WordPress, though, you’ll need a hosting environment to house all the PrestaShop installation and all your files. For that, we recommend A2 Hosting for being an industry leader in providing high-quality service at low prices. In addition to ample high-performance storage and bandwidth, upgraded hosting packages come with increased site acceleration and worry-free migrations. Learn more about A2 Hosting by clicking on our review below:

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When you start a new business, your website or online store represents a blank canvas. Sure, many shops have several common elements, but the world is your oyster when it comes to how you want to display and sell your products.

Beyond optimizing your online shop’s mobile experience, pay attention to simplified checkout processes; experts at Shortie Designs say you might be losing up to two-thirds of customers with a poorly designed conversion funnel. Look for designs that engage your visitors, making them more likely to return. Invest in stunning product photography, and spend time providing shoppers with in-depth descriptions about each item and its related options.

PrestaShop makes this easy by providing nearly 4,000 themes organized by software version, industry, style concept, and specific functionalities. In the platform’s add-ons marketplace, templates range from $70 to nearly $300.

Because of the sensitive financial and personal information involved with buying and shipping products, online stores are typically best served with a premium theme. Coding and security standards with free themes can be rather lax, leaving your business susceptible to attacks, sluggish to load, and off-putting to potential customers.

For those looking for more affordable ways to get started, however, your web hosting plan represents a chance to get your budget back on track. Because competition is fierce — particularly at the shared hosting levels of the industry — store owners can take advantage of feature-rich, seriously impressive plans for a fraction of what you may expect.

For less than $5 per month, you can expect to see unlimited storage, bandwidth, and email accounts, around-the-clock support, hundreds of one-click installations (including PrestaShop), strong managed security, a free SSL certificate, and one year of a free domain name registration. These feature-rich plans listed below are great for small business and those just getting started.

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In addition to your products and your website’s overall user experience, performance and page load speed are some of the biggest factors that determine whether a customer will click the buy button. More than half of consumers indicated that slow websites were the top reason they would abandon a purchase, and 44% said slow transactions gave them more anxiety about a purchase.

Fast loading sites are more than just for show; website performance bleeds into and affects conversion rates, bounce rates, time spent on the site, pages per session, repeat visitors, and other metrics of success.

Performance is so important that it’s measured down to the millisecond. An extra 250 milliseconds, or a quarter of a second, is noticeable enough for visitors to stop going to your site in favor of a competitor’s, according to The New York Times — and that was in 2012. The consumer’s need for speed has only grown since then. (For reference, it takes you about 400 milliseconds to blink your eyes.)

Fortunately, page speed is something you can work on. In addition to leveraging a content delivery network, which spreads your website information across a network of servers to put the data as close to your visitors as possible, site owners can pretty easily compress or reduce image file sizes, minify code, uninstall useless modules, and avoid including heavy homepage sliders, pop-ups, and other features on the site. Google’s PageSpeed Insights can provide a more technical checklist of issues to correct, such as reducing server load time, leveraging browser caching, and eliminating certain scripts.

Before you dive into all that, however, the first — and easiest — step you can take is hosting your online store with a provider that makes most of these adjustments for you automatically. A host’s decision to provide optimized infrastructure and upgraded hardware signals they’re invested in their customers’ success. Instead of offering the cheapest possible solutions and maximizing profits, the hosts listed below take those extra steps to ensure clients’ websites are always online and cruising at optimal speeds.

The quickest, simplest way to tell if a host cares about website performance is to look for three letters: SSD. The acronym stands for solid-state drives, and they’re a modern type of storage device that can read, write, and access data up to 20 times faster than traditional hard disk drives. Feel free to read up on why SSDs represent the better storage option for performance-minded site owners, or skip ahead to learn more about our three favorite hosts for this important feature:

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Speed is great and all, but even the best performance won’t matter much if your shop is always crashing and unavailable to visitors. Websites can go down for a variety of reasons — some are self-inflicted, others are beyond your control.

To prevent mishaps, be careful when updating your codebase, modules, or other software associated with your online store. If possible, create a staging environment to make sure the updates don’t break anything before you transition the changes over to your live site. Always take precautions to protect your website’s security. Oftentimes, attacks can trace back to exposing a known vulnerability in an outdated piece of software or oversimplified password.

One of the most frustrating causes of downtime, however, can actually come about when you’ve been too successful. You know how on Black Friday when so many people rush into a store at the same time, people end up getting hurt and things are broken? When too many people visit your online store at the same time, your servers feel the wrath and can get overwhelmed.

A quick way to deal with and prevent this potential outcome is to sign up with a higher level of web hosting service. Shared hosting is great for its affordability and features, but each client is given a relatively small share of a server’s computing resources. Plus, because so many customers have files on the same machine, one compromised website can bring a whole host of others crashing down with it.

Cloud hosting offers a simple, secure way to quickly scale up and down your server space and processing power. In this type of arrangement, several servers are networked together to share and duplicate your files. This redundancy means that if one piece of the network fails, the other servers can jump in and continue sending your site to visitors’ browsers. Plus, if you suddenly start seeing above-average amounts of traffic, additional servers can join the fight to help keep your website operational.

You typically hear about cloud hosting in the context of industry giants like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Although those services offer tremendous scalability and opportunities, they’re often extraordinarily hard to set up and maintain without an experienced IT department. Instead, we prefer to rely on traditional hosts that regularly serve small business owners and can offer easy-to-understand hosting configurations and support. Check out our favorite options below:

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So, is your head spinning yet? Web hosting can be an intimidating endeavor, particularly if it’s your first time creating an online store. There’s a lot to consider, from speed and security to scalability and design. Adding an eCommerce store, with all the aspects of inventory management, payment processing, order tracking, shipping, and other procedures, make the online experience even more complicated.

For store owners who would rather concentrate on growing their business, improving their products, or growing their catalog, managed services can be a tremendous help. Managed hosting and dedicated customer support offerings mean the hosting provider will handle most, if not all, of the technical components of your online store. Depending on the provider and your budget, you may still need to oversee a few small components of your store, but your host’s experts will set everything up for you.

Managed support will be the most responsive and most helpful to business owners. In addition to recommending the services and options best tailored to PrestaShop’s needs, hosts will install the software and configure it for optimal performance and security. The services come at a bit of a premium, but many entrepreneurs find managed support saves them ample time and money in the long run.

Some of the added benefits of managed support include: additional and proactive server monitoring, enhanced security (especially important for eCommerce transactions), automated data backups, reduced operating costs, and increased peace of mind. The three hosting providers we’ve listed below are known across the industry for providing timely support, affordable services, and impressive infrastructure. Learn more from our reviews below:

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Once you decide PrestaShop is the right eCommerce platform to power your business, you’ll naturally want to make sure the surrounding technologies are up to the task. Many hosting plans, including those listed above, come equipped with one-click PrestaShop installations, plenty of storage, and ample memory resources.

However, you’ll need to make sure those computing resources closely match your site’s needs both now and into the future. For instance, an established business will require premium services compared to a hobbyist looking to set out for the first time. Does your hosting provider handle domain registrations? What about security measures? Performance upgrades? Paying attention to the fine print can make a measurable difference in your site’s success and user experience.

As for PrestaShop itself, the platform recommends these specifications for your hosting environment:

• Apache 2.x, NGINX, or Microsoft IIS web server
• PHP 5.6+, MySQL 5.0+, and FTP access
• PHP memory limit of at least 128MB and upload file size limits at least 16MB
• Domain name (or subdomain) and SSL certificate
• Mcrypt, OpenSSL, Zip, Curl, GD, and PDO PHP extensions
• Memcached, Apc, and OpCache caching frameworks

PrestaShop provides an impressive installation guide, as well as instructions on adding PrestaShop to a local environment or computer. Basically, any host worth trusting with your business website should be able to provide these standard services. Don’t be afraid to set your sights a little higher, as the more modern technologies will serve to boost performance, reliability, and scalability in the future.

If you’re still a little unsure or hesitant about taking on this project yourself, don’t be afraid to contact a PrestaShop expert to help with initial configuration, migration, third-party integrations, custom development, or marketing.