5 Fields to Remove from Your PrestaShop Checkout to Boost Conversions by 20%

Optimizing your PrestaShop checkout is one of the fastest ways to turn browsing visitors into paying customers. By removing unnecessary steps and friction points, you can significantly reduce cart abandonment and increase overall revenue.

Small, targeted UI adjustments often yield dramatic improvements in your store's conversion rate. In this guide, we will explore simple yet powerful tweaks to streamline your PrestaShop checkout process.

Why every field costs you orders

To boost PrestaShop checkout conversions, remove five fields that add friction without adding value: the second address line, phone number, company name, date of birth and the state/province selector (for countries that do not require it). You can disable most from the Back Office under International > Locations and the rest via a small theme template edit or a free module. Fewer required inputs means fewer drop-off points and, on typical stores, a measurable lift in completed orders.

Think about the last time you abandoned a basket on your phone. It was probably not the price. It was a further screen of a checkout asking for your fax number and a title you do not use. Every field is a small decision, and every decision is a chance to close the tab.

That makes the uplift testable rather than a marketing number: install a session recorder, count how many customers reach the address step and how many press Orderand you have your baseline before touching a single setting.

The five fields worth cutting, and the friction each one creates:

• Address line 2 (the "Apartment, suite, etc." box) reads as mandatory to shoppers who live in a house, so they type a dash or a full stop just to move on.
• Phone number triggers the "will they call me?" objection, and many customers abandon rather than hand over a number they consider private.
• Company name is noise for the vast majority of B2C orders and makes the form look like it was built for invoices, not people.
• Date of birth is the field customers distrust most, because the reason for collecting it is never explained at the point of entry.
• State/province stalls international buyers who cannot find their region in a list built for a different country.

There is a second problem beyond the fields themselves: the number of pages they sit on. Splitting checkout across several screens multiplies the places a customer can leave. One Page Checkout PrestaShop module collapses the whole journey onto a single page, so trimming fields and reducing steps work together instead of competing.

Some stores have legitimate reasons to keep a field, such as a courier that requires a phone number for delivery. Treat each of the five as guilty until proven necessary.

What You'll Need

Before you change a single field, gather the access and tools this job depends on. Missing one of these halfway through is what turns a ten-minute edit into a broken checkout.

• Back Office access at the highest permission level, so you can reach International > Locations> Customers> Groups and Advanced Parameters > Performance.
• SFTP or hosting file manager credentials if you plan to edit theme templates rather than use a module.
• PrestaShop 1.7 or 8. x since the template paths in this guide follow the modern theme structure; older 1.6 stores use different files.
• A duplicated theme or staging copy so you can roll back in seconds if an order breaks.
• A payment gateway sandbox and at least one carrier rule that depends on the fields you remove, so you can prove nothing downstream fails.

Difficulty sits in the middle: the Back Office toggles are beginner-friendly, the template edits assume you can read Smarty and comment out a block without deleting it. Budget roughly 45-60 minutes for the first removal, including testing, and 10-15 minutes for each one after that once you know the paths.

Field 1: The second address line (address2)

The second address line is the field most shoppers abandon mid-typing. It exists for apartment numbers, building names and floor references, but the label Address (Line 2) gives no clue what belongs there, so buyers stall, re-read it, and sometimes leave the checkout entirely. On a UK or Irish store where most addresses are a single line plus a postcode, it is dead weight.

Removing it is a template edit rather than a configuration toggle. PrestaShop renders the address form from a Smarty template, so you are commenting out one block, not deleting core files. That keeps the change reversible if you ever sell into a market that needs it.

1. Connect to your server over SFTP or open your hosting file manager.
2. Navigate to themes/your-theme/templates/customer/_partials/address-form.tpl. If that path does not exist, look in templates/customer/address.tpl.
3. Find the block containing {$form_field.address2}.
4. Wrap it in Smarty comment tags: {* ... *}
5. Save, then clear the cache under Advanced Parameters > Performance.

Refresh your checkout and confirm the field is gone. Use the browser inspector to check no leftover wrapper leaves an empty gap where the input used to sit. If your carrier integration validates against a schema that expects address2, run this on a staging copy, complete one test order, then apply it to the live theme.

If you would rather not touch templates at all, a module gives you the same result from the Back Office. PrestaShop Custom Checkout Fields lets you hide, reorder and relabel address fields per customer group, which matters if your trade accounts need different data from retail buyers.

A field that makes shoppers pause is a field that costs you the sale at the finish line.

Field 2: Phone number (when you don't actually call)

Phone number is the field most likely to be mandatory for a reason nobody in the business can explain. Someone ticked "required" during the original PrestaShop install, and it has been scaring off customers ever since. Before you touch it, answer one question honestly: does your courier or payment provider genuinely refuse a delivery or a transaction without a number?

If the answer is no, it is friction you created yourself. The customer hesitates, wonders who will ring them, and a slice of them close the tab. That is the conversion uplift you are chasing, sitting in a single form row.

The three PrestaShop paths for this field

Which method fits depends on your version and how much control you want.

Carriers in markets like France, Italy and parts of Latin America often do need a reachable number for delivery windows, so leaving it optional rather than deleted is the safer move there. For the UK, US and most DTC stores shipping by standard courier, dropping it entirely is usually fine.

If your courier does not dial the number, every extra digit you demand is a customer you paid to acquire and then politely asked to leave.

Test it as a hypothesis, not a preference. Run the store with the field optional for a couple of weeks, compare completed orders against the previous period, then decide whether to remove it outright.

Field 3: Company name for B2C stores

Open any B2C PrestaShop checkout, and you will usually find a "Company" field sitting between the address lines and the postcode. It exists because PrestaShop has supported B2B selling for a long time, and the same address form serves both audiences. For a shop selling candles, coffee or phone cases, that field does nothing except add a decision the customer has to make.

The friction is small but real. A shopper filling in a home address sees "Company" and pauses: is this for a business order? Do I need to type my employer? Many leave it blank and move on, but the pause costs attention at the exact moment you want momentum.

The cleanest way to hide it is to turn off B2B mode for the customer group that should not see it:

1. Go to Customers, then Groups, and open the group you want to change (usually Customer).
2. Find the B2B mode toggle. Set it to No and save. PrestaShop then stops requesting company details for shoppers in that group.
3. If you need a per-country view of what is enabled, open International, then Locations, then Countries, edit the country, and review its Address format. Any field name placed there appears on that country's address form, so removing company from the layout takes it out.
4. Clear the cache, then place a test order to confirm the field is gone. Test with a delivery address in the country you edited, because the layout you changed only applies there.

Hiding Company is one of the fastest single-field wins in a B2C checkout, because nothing downstream depends on it. Invoices, delivery notes and tax rules all work without a company name.

If you sell to both retail and trade buyers, keep B2B mode switched on for your trade group only. That way wholesalers still see Company, VAT number and the other fields they expect, while retail shoppers get the shorter form. Pair that split with a purpose-built checkout so the whole flow stays short for both audiences, and see PrestaShop Custom Checkout Fields if you want to organise which fields appear for each group.

Fields 4 & 5: Date of birth and the state/province selector

These two fields fail in opposite directions. Date of birth is a text box almost nobody fills in, so it collects blanks or nonsense. The state/province dropdown is a fixed list that simply does not match the address many European customers actually live at.

Handle them together because both live in the same place: International -> Locations -> Countries for the dropdown, and the customer field configuration for the date of birth. If your store also runs gift or business orders where a field genuinely earns its place, the conditional approach covered in PrestaShop custom checkout fields lets you keep it visible for those customers only.

Removing the date of birth field

1. Navigate to Shop Parameters -> Customer Settings and open the field configuration for the Date of birth option.
2. Set the field to optional if PrestaShop allows it. If your age-gated products (alcohol, tobacco, knives) require it by law, leave it on and accept the friction.
3. For most stores, switch it off entirely. Ask yourself when you last used a customer's birthday to make a business decision. If the answer is never, the field is pure friction.
4. Save, then clear the Smarty cache under Advanced Parameters -> Performance so the change appears on the live checkout.

Replacing the state/province dropdown with a postcode field

PrestaShop ties the State field to the country's zone list. For France, Germany, or the Netherlands, this often produces an address mismatch, because customers select a region that does not match their postcode, and carriers then reject the label.

• Go to International -> Locations -> Countries and find the countries where the dropdown causes the most abandoned orders.
• Edit each country and disable the Contains states option. This removes the state dropdown from checkout for that country.
• Verify your shipping rules still resolve. Some carriers price by zone, and disabling states can collapse those rules into a single default.
• Test one order per affected country before going live.

If your carriers price by region, removing the state field without rewriting the zone rules will silently break your shipping costs. A single-page checkout such as the One Page Checkout PrestaShop: Fast, Simple & Conversion-Optimized Checkout module at $48.99 also removes the separate address review step, so the postcode and country land on the same screen the customer pays from.

What can and can't be removed (and the legal limits)

Before you touch the Back Office, sort your checkout fields into three buckets: delete, keep, and keep but make optional. Get that order wrong, and you will trade a conversion gain for a compliance problem or a delivery you cannot complete.

In PrestaShop, most editable fields live under International > Locations > Countries, where each country record carries settings such as Need zip code and the state/province rules for that territory. Your address and phone fields are driven by the Address object and the address form template, which is why the removals in this guide are done at template level rather than by deleting database columns.

• Free to remove: the second address line and the company field. Neither carries a legal obligation for consumer sales, and neither affects shipping labels or tax calculation.
• Remove with care: phone number. Courier networks often use it for delivery coordination, so switch it to optional rather than deleting it outright if you ship physical goods.
• Do not remove: country, postcode (where your carriers require it for rate calculation), the email address used for order confirmation, and the terms acceptance checkbox.

Two obligations are easy to confuse. VAT rules require the checkout to collect a valid VAT identification number from business customers, which is the strongest argument for keeping the company field on a B2B or mixed store even after you hide it for consumers. Under GDPR, you must give customers a way to accept your terms and privacy policy, so never strip the consent checkbox while you are deleting address lines.

A cleaner route than hard-deleting entries is to make the field conditional, so it appears only when it is actually relevant. PrestaShop Custom Checkout Fields lets you control which fields show for which customer groups, and PrestaShop Advanced Custom Fields extends that logic to registration and order data if you need it.

Removing a field is a conversion decision; removing a consent or tax field is a legal one, and the two should never be decided in the same sitting.

If you would rather not micro-manage individual fields at all, the bigger lever is collapsing the whole multi-step process into a single screen. One Page Checkout PrestaShop: Fast, Simple & Conversion-Optimized Checkout does exactly that for $48.99, which often makes field-by-field editing unnecessary for stores whose real problem is step count rather than field count.

How do you test a PrestaShop checkout change without breaking orders?

Never edit the live checkout. Duplicate your theme first, apply the field removals there, and place a test order as a guest before you touch the production store. A broken order confirmation costs more than any conversion gain.

A working rollout looks like this:

1. Duplicate the theme. In the Back Office, go to Design -> Theme & Logo, export your current theme, then create a duplicate for testing. If anything breaks, you switch back to the original in seconds.
2. Enable a sandbox store. Clone the database into a staging copy so test orders never pollute your real order list or trigger live confirmation emails to customers.
3. Test as a guest. Place an order with no account, using a real delivery address, and confirm the order appears correctly in Orders with the address intact.
4. Test the edge cases. Try an order with a virtual product, an out-of-stock item, and a voucher code. Field removals often surface faults only when a carrier or payment rule depends on the data you removed.
5. Track the change. Add a Google Tag Manager event on the checkout page to compare completion rates before and after. A simple A/B split, half your traffic on the new checkout, tells you whether the uplift is real for your store.

If you want a shortcut that avoids fiddling with field-by-field removal, One Page Checkout PrestaShop: Fast, Simple & Conversion-Optimized Checkout collapses the whole multi-step flow into a single page, so the testing job becomes one comparison instead of five.

If you map fields to your own data model during this phase, the custom checkout fields module lets you add only what you actually need, which is easier to test than half-removed defaults. Once a test passes, push the change live, watch conversion for a full week, and keep the old theme export until you're confident.

Measuring the uplift: the PrestaShop metrics that matter

Removing five fields is only half the job. Without a baseline, you cannot tell whether the change produced a real uplift or whether a seasonal traffic spike flattered your numbers. Set your benchmark before you touch the Back Office, then measure again a few weeks after the change.

Three KPIs tell you almost everything about checkout friction in PrestaShop.

• Checkout completion rate: orders divided by the number of visitors who reached the checkout page. This is the number you are trying to move.
• Field-level drop-off: the step where shoppers abandon. In a multi-step checkout, PrestaShop records the cart at the point it is left.
• Cart abandonment rate: the share of carts created that never become orders. Track it alongside completion rate so a rise in low-intent carts does not look like a regression.

Where to read them: Stats > Dashboards for the headline order and visitor counts, Stats > Search Engines and Stats > Customers for traffic quality, and Orders > Carts to inspect abandoned carts individually. PrestaShop stores the abandoned cart record with the customer's last completed action, so filtering by date tells you whether drop-off moved.

If you run a single-page checkout such as One Page Checkout PrestaShop: Fast, Simple & Conversion-Optimized Checkout, there are no discrete steps left to measure, so field-level drop-off collapses into one number. That is a feature, not a gap: you compare completion rate before and after, on matched traffic. Google Analytics 4 or Matomo will give you the same comparison.

Journal each change separately. Only one variable at a time keeps the improvement attributable, so resist removing all five fields and a redesign in the same fortnight.

Troubleshooting

Most failed field removals fall into a handful of predictable patterns. Check these before you assume the change was a bad idea.

• A removed field still appears on the checkout: a cached template is being served. Clear the Smarty cache under Advanced Parameters > Performance and, if you use a CDN, purge it too.
• The order will not submit after you hide a field: a carrier or payment module still expects that value. Re-enable it as optional rather than hidden, following the three-path table in the phone number section.
• Shipping costs collapse to one flat rate: disabling states removed the zones your carrier rules were built on. Rebuild the zone mapping before leaving the field off.
• The checkout looks broken on mobile only: the remaining fields are reflowing into narrow columns. Check the single-page layout on a real handset, not just desktop resizing.
• Completion rate drops after the change: you removed something customers relied on, most often a visible delivery estimate. Roll back and remove one field at a time.

Method 1: One Page Checkout PrestaShop

If your goal is a leaner checkout without touching theme files, One Page Checkout PrestaShop consolidates the multi-step flow into a single page and removes the account-creation wall that PrestaShop shows by default. It costs $48.99 and is available for PrestaShop from the FME Modules catalogue.

Pair it with Custom Fields at Checkout if you need to strip a default field while adding a justified replacement, and Advanced Custom Fields if you need field-level control over what appears during registration.

Step 1: Install and Enable the Module

Removing fields through a module is safer than editing core files, because PrestaShop upgrades will not overwrite your changes. The module approach also keeps you inside the Back Office, which matters if you do not have a developer on hand.

Navigate to Modules > Module Manager:

• Search for One Page Checkout PrestaShop in the module search bar.
• Click Install, then Configure once the install completes.
• Check that the module is enabled for your active theme, not just the default theme.

You should now see the module's configuration panel in your Back Office menu.

Step 2: Activate the Single-Page Flow

PrestaShop's default checkout splits the process into separate steps (Personal Information, Addresses, Shipping, Payment). Each step is a fresh opportunity for the customer to leave. Collapsing them into one page removes those exit points entirely.

Navigate to Modules > Module Manager > One Page Checkout PrestaShop > Configure:

• Turn on Single Page Checkout to replace the multi-step flow.
• Leave Guest Checkout enabled so new customers are not forced to create an account before ordering.
• Save the configuration, then open a product page in a private browser window to confirm the new layout loads.

You should now see the entire order flow, from address to payment, on one screen.

Tip: Test the single-page layout on a real phone before pushing it live. PrestaShop's default theme collapses address fields into narrow columns on small screens, and a cramped checkout undoes the gain.

Step 3: Choose Which Fields Stay

Once the flow is on one page, you can decide field by field what earns its place. The rule that works: keep a field only if it is needed to ship the order, take payment, or legally invoice the customer.

Open the module's field configuration section and review each block:

• Required fields which the customer must complete before ordering. Strip this down to first name, last name, email, address, postcode, city, and country.
• Optional fields which appear but can be skipped. Move anything non-essential here rather than deleting it outright, so you keep the data for customers willing to share it.
• Hidden fields which do not render at all. Use this for fields you never actually read, such as address2 or a second phone number.

You should now have a field list where every remaining entry has a clear reason to exist. For a deeper walkthrough of adding, hiding, and reordering individual fields, see PrestaShop Advanced Custom Fields.

Step 4: Verify the Order Still Completes

Field removal can silently break validation or payment. Shipping carriers may need a phone number for delivery notifications; some payment modules reject an order without a state value. Verify before you trust the change.

Open your staging storefront in a private browser window:

• Place a full test order as a guest, from product page through to the confirmation screen.
• Check Orders in the Back Office and confirm the delivery address, shipping method and total all recorded correctly.
• Repeat once with a voucher code applied and once with a virtual product in the basket.

You should now see a completed test order with every address detail stored exactly as the customer entered it.

Warning: Never run this test against your live store. A failed payment handoff on a production checkout can leave real customers stranded mid-order while you roll back.

Conclusion

You have now cut the fields that cost you orders without earning their place, and you have a testing routine that proves each removal actually helped. Whether you edited templates by hand, used PrestaShop Custom Checkout Fields to control visibility per group, or went straight to a single-page flow, the outcome is the same: fewer decisions between your customer and the confirm button.

The remaining job is patience. Change one thing, watch the metrics for a week, and only then move to the next field. Over time, the checkout gets shorter, and your completion rate tells you the truth.

If you want the fastest route to a leaner checkout, install One Page Checkout PrestaShop: Fast, Simple & Conversion-Optimized Checkout for $48.99 and collapse the whole multi-step journey onto a single screen today.

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