E-commerce·February 24, 2025·12 min read
Migrating PrestaShop to Headless: A Real-World Playbook
How we migrated a 50k-SKU PrestaShop store to a headless architecture and tripled conversion. Step-by-step.
Why headless
Monolithic PrestaShop themes are great for small catalogs. Past 10k SKUs, Smarty rendering and theme bloat become hard performance ceilings. Headless lets the storefront ride on a modern framework while PrestaShop stays the source of truth for products, stock, and orders.
Architecture
We kept PrestaShop as the back-office and exposed a custom REST API layer. The storefront runs on Next.js with ISR, deployed on Vercel. Search is handled by Algolia, payments by Stripe, sessions by NextAuth.
Results after 90 days
- LCP dropped from 4.2s to 1.1s
- Conversion rate +218%
- Mobile bounce rate -41%
- Lighthouse Performance: 38 → 96
What we'd do differently
Cache invalidation between PrestaShop and the headless layer was the hardest problem. We'd build the cache strategy first, before writing a single API endpoint.