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In the world of modern e-commerce, where performance and loading speed directly impact conversions, bounce rates and SEO positioning, the lack of native advanced caching features is a handicap that cannot be underestimated. In this context, PrestaShop, despite being one of the most popular and potentially promising platforms for e-commerce, continues to drag behind it a chronic shortcoming: the lack of native support for Varnish Cache.
A Note on Varnish Cache
A Note on Varnish Cache
Varnish Cache is one of the most powerful and widespread HTTP reverse proxies in the world, designed to dramatically speed up the delivery of web content. It is designed for high-traffic scenarios and is used by some of the largest internet portals to reduce the load on application servers, serving cached pages directly from RAM in a few milliseconds. Its main strength is the ability to manage the Full Page Cache (FPC), or the complete cache of the HTML page, avoiding going through the PHP engine or the database every time.
Thanks to the VCL (Varnish Configuration Language), Varnish allows extreme customization of caching rules, allowing you to define intelligent behaviors for the inclusion or exclusion of certain resources. It is particularly effective when properly integrated with applications that support specific HTTP headers for cache control, selective invalidation of content and advanced session management.
In the e-commerce context, Varnish is often the only choice for those who want to scale without compromising performance. Magento 2 integrates it natively, WooCommerce can be easily adapted, while PrestaShop – inexplicably – continues to ignore its existence in its core. A choice that, as we will see, has serious consequences for those who manage online stores with significant traffic volumes.
The competitive context: Shopify, Magento 2, WooCommerce
To understand how serious and limiting the lack of native support for Varnish in PrestaShop is, it is essential to understand the competitive context in which it is inserted. The e-commerce market today is extremely mature and aggressive, with solutions ranging from all-in-one SaaS platforms to advanced and well-optimized open source CMS. And in this race for performance, PrestaShop still starts with the handbrake on.
Shopify, despite being a closed and fully managed platform, represents a benchmark in terms of user experience and performance. It uses a global infrastructure network powered by Cloudflare, ensuring that every asset, every page, every interaction is delivered in the most efficient way possible. The CDN reverse proxy works in symbiosis with a highly optimized backend and a centralized and invisible caching system for the user, who does not have to worry about any configuration. The page cache is intelligently updated based on the content and changes made by the administrator, and the infrastructure absorbs very high traffic loads without the slightest perceptible impact. It is a black box, yes, but a black box that is fast, stable and suitable for modern commerce. With a few clicks, even a novice can have an e-commerce that responds in less than 500 ms anywhere in the world.
Magento 2, for its part, is the opposite of Shopify: an open source platform designed for complex and scalable architectures, which makes modularity and customization its strong point. But here, unlike PrestaShop, native support for Varnish cache has been considered essential since version 2.0. The admin interface allows you to enable Full Page Cache with Varnish without having to resort to third-party plugins or hacks. All the necessary headers are generated by the core, and the cache tag management allows for selective and instant invalidation of content. Furthermore, Magento can be configured in high availability environments, clustered with Varnish and Redis, to handle promotional events, seasonal peaks or flash sales without problems. In essence, the Magento–Varnish duo is an industrial choice for those looking for reliability and performance at scale.
WooCommerce, despite not being natively integrated with Varnish, has such a mature WordPress ecosystem and is full of high-performance solutions that it still manages to position itself well. There are plugins like Proxy Cache Purge, CLP Varnish Cache, nginx helper, and entire optimized stacks like those offered by Servebolt, Kinsta, presslabs,Cloudways, or ours in Managed Server Srl, which make implementing advanced caching systems relatively simple. Some providers like ours include Varnish directly in the hosting plan, with pre-configured rules that automatically exclude dynamic areas such as the cart, checkout or user area. In addition, support for Edge Side Includes (ESI), through advanced plugins, allows granular management of dynamic content blocks even in an aggressive cache context. Although WooCommerce was not created for the enterprise, the ecosystem does everything to fill the gap – with often surprising results.
PrestaShop, on the contrary, not only does not offer any of this natively, but also seems to systematically ignore the needs of advanced server-side caching. In a scenario where competitors – some by architecture, some by ecosystem, some by strategy – have understood that the HTTP cache is one of the key elements for scalability and user experience, PrestaShop remains anchored to an obsolete model, delegating everything to the Smarty cache or superficial solutions, unsuitable for modern traffic.
In a landscape where speed and resilience have become decisive parameters in choosing an e-commerce platform, PrestaShop risks being perceived more and more as a solution that is valid “only up to a certain point”. And that point, unfortunately, is reached much sooner than you might expect when you don’t have a robust caching system like Varnish behind you.
PrestaShop 8: missed opportunity
The announcement of PrestaShop 8 had generated a fair amount of anticipation in the open source e-commerce scene. After years in which version 1.7 had shown all its limitations in terms of architecture, maintenance and compatibility with modern web standards, the arrival of branch 8 seemed to represent a turning point. The promises were all there: a more modular structure, a codebase more oriented towards PSR standards, a more maintainable backend and a more up-to-date technological stack. Many – developers, agencies and system integrators – also expected the introduction of a serious native caching system, or at least a clear opening towards consolidated solutions such as Varnish Cache.
And yet, once again, none of this has materialized. In 2025, PrestaShop continues to completely ignore the issue of Full Page Cache at HTTP Level. No substantial new features have been introduced in the core to facilitate integration with Varnish, nor has an official module developed or supported directly by the team been released. And it's not just the absence of the module itself, but a complete lack of architectural vision: there is no dedicated technical documentation, no official best practices, no concrete integration examples, and not even an effort to make PrestaShop more “Varnish-friendly”.
Anyone who wants to integrate Varnish must resign themselves to taking complex paths, relying on third-party modules of dubious quality, often abandoned or incompatible with the most recent versions of the platform. Alternatively, it is necessary to resort to handcrafted configurations based on custom VCLs, cookie filtering, custom HTTP headers and a deep knowledge of PrestaShop's internal dynamics. Even in these cases, however, the result is fragile: the absence of a cache tagging system, the impossibility of selectively invalidating the cache and the emission of cookies even for anonymous visitors make the integration a real obstacle course.
It's as if the PrestaShop team continues to treat caching as an "extra", something that can be left to the good heart of the community or delegated to the infrastructure without foreseeing its strategic impact. But this vision is short-sighted. The absence of a official compatibility layer with Varnish or other reverse proxies Today it is no longer a simple functional deficiency: it is a factor of exclusion for anyone who wants to build a truly scalable and competitive e-commerce, capable of supporting hundreds of requests per second with stable performance.
Version 8, with all its potential, was the perfect time to fill this gap. But instead of seizing the opportunity, they chose to continue on a conservative path, limiting themselves to small technical interventions that do not address the central issue: the need for an intelligent and natively integrated caching system.
A real wasted opportunity, which today weighs like a millstone on all PrestaShop installations that must support significant loads, and which forces merchants and sysadmins to use custom, expensive, fragile and often unsustainable solutions in the long term.
The technical problems
The integration between Varnish and PrestaShop is anything but trivial. The main issues are focused on:
- User sessions and cookies: PrestaShop tends to generate cookies aggressively, even for anonymous users, making it difficult to cache pages.
- Dynamic content: elements such as cart, favorites, login, wishlist, show personalized data and require caching exclusion strategies or the use of ESI (Edge Side Includes), which are not natively supported.
- Complicated Routing: the lack of “clean” and predictable URLs for some dynamic sections complicates writing effective VCL rules.
All of these issues are technically surmountable, but require advanced system skills and a deep understanding of the PrestaShop infrastructure, discouraging many merchants from attempting any form of advanced optimization.
The performance paradox
The situation is paradoxical: PrestaShop, if correctly configured and without heavy plugins, is objectively faster than Magento 2 (in basic configuration) and more performing than WooCommerce. Its architecture is less complex, and response times in LAMP or LEMP environments are generally excellent. However, when traffic increases, the lack of a Efficient Full Page Cache as Varnish represents an unavoidable bottleneck.
This means that for e-commerce sites with significant traffic, PrestaShop needs more resources to maintain acceptable performance than a solution using Varnish, which could instead serve static pages in a few milliseconds, without even involving PHP or MySQL.
In other words, the problem is not the average performance, but the scalability. And without Varnish (or an equivalent), PrestaShop's scalability remains limited or heavily dependent on custom solutions.
Possible solutions, all insufficient
Some agencies and professionals have tried to fill the gap by offering paid modules or ad hoc implementations. Some examples include:
- Modules that “clean” cookies for guest users, enabling Varnish caching
- Integrations with reverse proxy caches like NGINX Microcache or Redis
- Headless or hybrid architectures with separate front-ends
But all these solutions are workarounds, not official answers. They lack some Technical specifications for reference, some are missing cache invalidation mechanisms well designed, the main thing missing is the PrestaShop team's will to solve the problem at the core level.
A neglected responsibility
Varnish is not a whim of geeks. It is a consolidated technology, adopted in the largest e-commerce in the world. To expect a modern platform like PrestaShop, in 2025, to still ignore the problem is incomprehensible. Especially if you consider that a few precautions would be enough:
- An official module maintained by the core team
- A standard invalidation tag or header cache system
- A cache-aware backend with Varnish-specific outputs
- A documented integration with real and tested examples
Instead, we continue to invest in social modules, marginal backoffice improvements and graphic restyling, neglecting the most critical infrastructural aspect for the success of a modern e-commerce.
Conclusions (polemical but constructive)
PrestaShop today finds itself in an ambiguous position, halfway between two worlds: too advanced to be considered an “entry-level” platform, but at the same time too lacking in some fundamental infrastructural aspects to be able to seriously compete with the most modern and high-performance enterprise solutions. It is a solid, flexible platform with an intuitive backend, but its architecture suffers when it comes to scalability and advanced performance optimization.
The lack of native support for Varnish Cache is a strategic choice that is difficult to justify, especially in a context in which the competition – both in the SaaS world and among open source CMS – has long understood the importance of Full Page Cache (FPC) as a key element for the sustainable growth of an e-commerce. The most aware merchants, and the specialized agencies that support them, know well how important speed and efficiency are in serving content: and this is why they are increasingly turning to solutions with Native and well integrated FPC, capable of elegantly handling large volumes of traffic.
It is desirable that the PrestaShop core team finally become aware of this structural gap and raise it to a priority in the project roadmap. There is no need to completely overturn the entire platform: a well-designed official module, an abstraction layer compatible with reverse proxies like Varnish, and clear and updated technical documentation would be enough. With a few concrete steps, PrestaShop could fill a gap that currently penalizes it heavily in terms of performance.
Meanwhile, those who have chosen PrestaShop for high-traffic projects know well that obtaining acceptable performance requires the intervention of expert system administrators, specialized DevOps and a significant amount of infrastructure customization. Solutions that, while working, they shouldn't be the only way forward.
For our part, at Managed Server SRL we have developed customized modules and specific optimizations that allow the integration of Varnish Cache on PrestaShop, offering customized hosting plans for high-traffic e-commerce sites that require real, measurable and scalable performance. If you are considering a leap in quality for your PrestaShop shop and want to finally exploit the power of Full Page Cache, contact us: we will guide you in choosing the ideal architecture, with concrete and field-tested solutions.
Because in the world of modern e-commerce, where every second of loading time impacts sales and user experience, Broken promises are not forgotten: they are paid for, and at a high price.
