In this guide (7)
- 1What PrestaShop is and why it's popular in Italy
- 2When it makes sense to choose PrestaShop
- 3The real costs of a PrestaShop ecommerce
- 4The structural limits no agency tells you about
- 5Security: the weak point that costs the most
- 6When PrestaShop is not the right choice
- 7The alternative: managed ecommerce with a fixed fee
We have been managing PrestaShop sites since the platform was at version 1.2. We have migrated clients from PrestaShop, optimized compromised ones, and fixed broken ones. What follows is not a review from a general-interest blog: it is a technical evaluation based on over 15 years of real work on the platform.
PrestaShop can be the right choice for your ecommerce store. But it depends on what you need, how much you are willing to invest in maintenance, and which risks you are willing to accept. This guide tells you everything you should know before you start — or before you continue.
If you have already decided to rely on a provider and would rather avoid the maintenance and structural risks described in this guide right from the start, you can consider building an ecommerce store with a fixed fee, with no plugins to manage.
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What PrestaShop is and why it's popular in Italy
PrestaShop is an open source CMS dedicated to ecommerce, born in France in 2007 and today among the most used platforms in Europe, with a significant presence in the Italian market. It's free in its basic version, has an active community, a marketplace of modules and templates, and an ecosystem of specialized agencies.
Its popularity in Italy is explained by three historical reasons: it arrived before WooCommerce in the Italian market, it has a carefully curated Italian version, and many Italian agencies have specialized in the platform, building know-how that still fuels new projects today.
On paper the numbers seem favorable. In practice, as with WordPress, the correct evaluation isn't made on the software itself but on the overall ecosystem — modules, hosting, maintenance, security, scalability — and on the total cost over 3-5 years.
When it makes sense to choose PrestaShop
PrestaShop is a rational choice in specific scenarios. If you recognize them, the platform does its job.
The first scenario is a complex product catalog with many variants, attributes and combinations. PrestaShop natively handles elaborate catalogs better than WooCommerce in its basic version, and the database structure is designed for this type of complexity. An ecommerce with 500 products, each with 10 color and size variants, runs well on a correctly configured PrestaShop.
The second scenario is a company that already has management software (SAP, Danea, Gamma, As400) and needs to synchronize inventory, orders and invoicing. PrestaShop has an ecosystem of mature connectors for the main Italian management systems — connectors that exist for WooCommerce too, but are less tried and tested on the Italian market.
The third scenario is a B2B project with price lists differentiated by customer, volume discounts, minimum orders and approval management. PrestaShop has dedicated modules for this type of logic that require less custom development compared to other platforms.
Outside of these scenarios, the choice of PrestaShop is often based on the agency's familiarity with the platform — not necessarily on the fact that it's the best solution for the client.
The real costs of a PrestaShop ecommerce
The cost of a PrestaShop ecommerce is structured across several levels, and only the first one appears in the initial quote.
Initial setup
A professional PrestaShop ecommerce for an Italian SME costs between €2,500 and €8,000 in initial development depending on: number of products and variants, integrations with company systems, graphic customization, additional modules needed. Below €2,500 you get a basic installation with a barely customized commercial template — it works, but it doesn't compete.
Dedicated hosting
PrestaShop requires significant server resources. A correctly configured VPS for an ecommerce in production costs €30-80/month. With an optimized database, Redis for caching and a CDN, you can reach €100-150/month. Over 3 years: €1,080-5,400 for hosting alone — an item almost never made explicit in the initial quote.
Paid modules
The PrestaShop marketplace has thousands of modules, but the quality ones for essential features — Italian electronic invoicing, advanced transactional emails, advanced SEO, abandoned cart recovery, returns management — cost between €50 and €300 each, often with an annual license. A complete setup requires 5-10 premium modules: €500-2,000/year.
Maintenance and updates
Every PrestaShop core update requires checking compatibility with installed modules. Every module update can break something. On a production ecommerce, every maintenance intervention has a cost — in developer hours or in a monthly contract (€50-200/month). Over 3 years: €1,800-7,200 in maintenance.
The structural limits no agency tells you about
After years of working on PrestaShop, these are the problems that systematically emerge — not in the first weeks, but after 12-18 months from launch.
The database that grows and slows down
PrestaShop uses a database structure with many tables and complex joins. Over time — thousands of orders, session logs, price history — the database grows and queries slow down. A PrestaShop ecommerce running for 3 years without regular database optimization has significantly worse response times than when it started. Optimization is possible but requires periodic technical intervention that has a cost.
Dependence on modules
PrestaShop in its base version is not enough for a professional ecommerce. You add modules, and every module added is a dependency: if the module stops being maintained (which happens often with independent developers), it stops receiving security updates but remains installed and active. With 10-15 active modules, over 3 years it's almost certain that one or two will become a weak point.
Major version upgrades
The jump from PrestaShop 1.7 to PrestaShop 8 forced many Italian merchants to choose between keeping an outdated version (with the security risks that entails) and facing a migration that in many cases required rewriting custom modules. A major version upgrade on a PrestaShop with significant customizations can cost more than the original project.
Security: the weak point that costs the most
Security is the area where real-world experience with PrestaShop diverges most from initial perception.
In 2025-2026, over 230 documented vulnerabilities were recorded in PrestaShop modules — including very widely used payment and checkout modules. The attack surface is amplified by the fact that the source code is public: anyone can analyze outdated versions and build automated exploits.
In our direct experience we have handled security incidents on PrestaShop that included: SSTI injection on page builder modules, webshells uploaded through vulnerabilities in upload modules, and Magecart attacks with skimming scripts injected directly into checkout controllers. In all cases the compromise happened through third-party modules, not through the PrestaShop core — but the result for the merchant is identical.
The admin panel at /admin with a random suffix is an obscurity measure, not real security. An automated scanner finds the panel in a few attempts. The application WAF — a firewall that analyzes every request before it reaches the PHP code — is the protection that makes the difference, and it's not native to PrestaShop: it has to be added through server configuration or dedicated modules.
When PrestaShop is not the right choice
Based on real-world experience, these are the cases in which choosing PrestaShop is a decision you pay for in the following months.
If you don't have an in-house technical team or an active maintenance contract with a specialized agency, PrestaShop accumulates technical debt quickly. The platform requires constant attention — updates, optimizations, security monitoring — which can't be delegated to a "we'll deal with it when something breaks" approach.
If your ecommerce has a simple catalog (fewer than 200 products, few variants, no complex integrations) and you don't have the B2B use cases described above, PrestaShop brings a complexity that doesn't justify the benefits compared to solutions that are simpler to manage.
If you already have a PrestaShop with slowness issues, this is the clearest signal. PrestaShop slowness — high TTFB, product pages that load in 4-6 seconds — is almost never definitively solved through optimization: it eases temporarily and then comes back. It's a symptom of the architecture, not a configuration problem.
If you've already had a security incident on PrestaShop — and there have been many in Italy over the last 2 years — the right question is not "how do I patch the hole" but "how many other similar holes exist in the modules I have installed". The honest answer is: probably a few.
The alternative: managed ecommerce with a fixed fee
Those who come to consider an alternative to PrestaShop usually do so after spending 12-18 months dealing with slowness, updates and at least one security incident. The starting point is almost always: "I want to sell online, not manage the infrastructure".
KeideaCMS Business is the alternative that meets this need. The ecommerce module is integrated into the core — not added via third-party modules — with product catalog, variants, stock management, cart, checkout and order management. Dedicated hosting on Italian servers, native WAF that analyzes every request, zero modules to update, maintenance included in the fee.
The fee is fixed: €1,188/year (€99/month), setup included, zero commissions on sales. Over 3 years the total cost is €3,564 — less than what many PrestaShop ecommerces cost in maintenance alone over the same period, without even considering hosting and modules.
If you have a slow PrestaShop or want to consider migrating, building an ecommerce without PrestaShop's structural dependencies starts with a free analysis of your current situation.
KeideaCMS Business
Managed ecommerce with a fixed fee: zero modules, zero commissions, zero maintenance on your side.
