The Ultimate Guide To PrestaShop 9 Upgrade

PrestaShop 9 represents a significant step forward in performance, security, scalability, and future-readiness. If you’re an online store owner, you’re always looking for ways to improve your overall sales operation, ranging from your customers’ experience to the layout of your product pages. 

Let’s face it, there are always things that you can do to help sell more. For merchants, developers, and digital agencies, the new release is bringing game-changing improvements to the way they sell online.

Read on to discover why PS 9 is so significant and why now is the ideal time to prepare for your upgrade.

The Innovative Prestashop 9

A new technology stack is the heart of PrestaShop 9. The platform is now written in Symfony 6.4, a long-term support (LTS) framework guaranteed for security fixes until 2027. This is quite a leap forward from Symfony 4.4, being lighter on resources, faster, and more secure.

Added portability with PHP 8.4, and more support for PHP 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3. That breadth of compatibility means you’re not just running the latest tech, you’re also getting faster code execution, better syntax, and access to newer libraries and tools.

For developers, the result here is cleaner, more expressive code. For the merchants, that means better site performance, enhanced security, and a platform that’s easier to scale and maintain.

The Brand New Admin API

Version 9’s hallmark feature is, without a doubt, a brand-new Admin API, based on API Platform, one of the most powerful and developer-friendly PHP frameworks currently available on the market.

With this new API, integrations with CRMs, ERPs, marketing systems, inventory admin, and many more are a few lines of code away. Now developers can enjoy not only a modern, but also continuous REST API with JSON support, and can easily automate or generate tasks, establish personalized workflows, and connect PrestaShop with other tools.

The core of the Admin API is already available, although the feature set will continue to change as we iterate. And the outlook is promising; it has a road map for growing its capabilities even more.

If you are working with Prestashop marketing automation tools, this new API architecture will make it significantly easier to build personalized, data-driven campaigns that run in real time. From Customer Segmentation to Dynamic Product Recommendations, you can sync data effortlessly between your store and your marketing tools.

Hummingbird 

PrestaShop 9 also comes with Hummingbird, a brand new front theme that delivers a completely overhauled experience for shoppers and developers alike. Utilizes Bootstrap 5, TypeScript, and follows best practices with the BEM CSS naming convention. Hummingbird is the new generation of PrestaShop themes.

This is the answer to a long-term big question for the community: how to upgrade the Classic theme without bastardizing it? - Hummingbird’s modern, flexible technology provides developers a platform on which to build, while for merchants, Hummingbird means:

• Quicker load times and higher performance
• Easy-Clean: modular structure, easy to customize, and ready for endless possibilities!
• Dark mode support
• SEO-friendly markup
• Lessens Furnishing to third-party libraries

This is just one of many functionalities that can drastically change your online store’s look and feel! Hummingbird is not the default yet, but having it as a theme sends a clear message for the future of PS. If you want a modern store that looks great on mobile and can be found with ease in search results, this is the place for you to begin.

Smart SEO and URL Management for Maximum Visibility

SEO is one of the most important things in e-commerce, and PrestaShop has made substantial improvements in this PrestaShop 9. Cleaner URLs out-of-the-box, get rid of category paths by default, and stack the odds in your favor of not getting indexed.

You might also remove the default language prefix from your URLs - this fixed the problem with redirection for me when adding additional languages. And now, you can set 301 or 302 redirects for inactive categories to gain more control over your site’s structure and SEO.

To take advantage of these changes, you can combine PrestaShop 9’s native SEO features with an Advanced SEO Module. This type of module allows you total control over meta tags, rich snippets, canonical URLs, and more that are bound to assist in the negotiation of the type of product you want to resell, and your product page is appropriately optimized for maximum visibility.

The filtered category pages are no longer indexed, as is the recommended best practice by the main search engines. Even Breadcrumbs benefited from new features and is now using the real category path, which will make user and bot navigation easier.

Better Front Office Features 

PrestaShop 9 isn’t only a set of backend upgrades. A number of front office improvements add significantly to the shopping experience:

• Support for WebP and AVIF images to load pages faster
• Product reminder for items already in the cart of the user
• Guest checkout is enabled even if a user account exists
• Optimizations for jQuery UI and better product rendering

Individually, the changes may seem small, but altogether they add up to a smoother, more user-friendly, more high-performance online shop.

Smarter Back Office Management

No more hassle with a growing store! A new back office in PrestaShop 9 is designed to make managing a store easier. Some useful small parts of the monoliths—such as the Login, Products, Orders, and Attributes pages—have already been completely ported to Symfony and Twig and run behind a nice FPC layer, resulting in much better performance and more maintainable code.

Other enhancements include:

• A consistent look matching the new PrestaShop identity
• Enhanced user experience through cleaner navigation
• Manually add guest customers for better service 
• More accurate module logging for diagnostics and audit reasons

Whether you’re uploading items or delivering purchases, the simplified back office and visually detailed dashboard help you spend less time with spreadsheets and more time with your customers.

Security and Debugging

Security has always been a key pillar of e-commerce. PrestaShop 9 has gone one step further. Table prefixes are now randomized upon installation to help prevent SQL injection. Access to PHP files is denied in order to avoid the most common vulnerabilities.

Debug is also on a per-user basis, so you can debug without worrying about sharing sensitive information with others.

Such improvements will empower merchants and developers with greater trust that their store is solid, secure, and shielded from modern threats.

A Better Way to Upgrade with Update Assistant

It can be intimidating to upgrade to a full version of any e-commerce platform, but PrestaShop 9 has solved a major problem in this area, too. The brand new Update Assistant 7 (former 1-Click-Upgrade) accelerates this process and makes it even more safe and user-friendly for you.

Key features include:

• A step-by-step wizard with clearly explained instructions
• CLI for Pro users [] Command-Line Interface (CLI) for power users []
• Better large store support
• Detailed validation checking and error reporting

No matter if you are working alone or with a set of team, as a single developer or part of a big team, the Update Assistant makes the transition to PrestaShop 9 easy and comfortable.

Final Thoughts

PrestaShop 9 isn't a release like any other release; it’s a real milestone in the history of our software. The release is future-proof with LTS versions of tech, improved APIs, smarter SEO, and updated design philosophy.

Performance, security, and UX enhancements mean merchants will see better conversions, have fewer headaches, and have the room to grow their business. For developers, it’s an opportunity to develop faster, more modular solutions, and with a modern underpinning that promises more prosperity.

It’s time to switch to a new shop and discover the Hummingbird theme as well as the impactful features offered long before, such as the Advanced SEO Module, as well as the only Prestashop marketing automation tools. Your e-commerce future begins now with PrestaShop 9.