PrestaShop in the UK: pros, cons and when to migrate to WooCommerce

PrestaShop works perfectly well for a UK shop. It is free, open source, has a strong retail core and handles multiple languages and currencies better than most of its rivals. The catch in the UK is the ecosystem: far fewer British developers know it, many useful features are paid modules priced in euros, and fewer modules are written with UK carriers and VAT in mind. Our rule of thumb is simple. If your PrestaShop store is on version 8 or 9, stable and doing its job, keep it. If it is stuck on 1.6 or an early 1.7, costly to change, or you struggle to find anyone to support it, moving to WooCommerce is usually the better long-term spend.

We support PrestaShop stores and also migrate them, so the advice below covers both sides: how to get the most out of PrestaShop if you stay, and how to move without losing orders, customers or search rankings if you go.

PrestaShop in a nutshell

PrestaShop started in Paris in 2007 and is most popular in France, Spain, Italy and other European markets. The Italian logistics group MBE Worldwide has held a majority stake since 2022. You download the software, host it yourself, and extend it with themes and modules, most of which are sold through the official PrestaShop Addons marketplace.

The current releases are PrestaShop 8, which brought support for PHP 8, and PrestaShop 9, released in 2025, which continues moving the back office onto a newer Symfony foundation. Major version upgrades are real projects rather than button presses, so a lot of UK stores we look at are still running 1.7 or even 1.6. Version 1.6 no longer receives security fixes and needs dealing with, whatever else you decide.

What PrestaShop does well

A complete retail core

Out of the box you get product combinations (size, colour, material), stock management, customer groups with group pricing, cart rules and vouchers, carriers with weight and price ranges, delivery zones, and a sensible order workflow with statuses you can customise. A fresh WooCommerce install needs a handful of plugins to match that.

Multi-language and multi-store

This is where PrestaShop shines. Running one catalogue in English, French and German, with different currencies and even separate shops from one back office, is built in. If you sell into Europe from the UK and want proper translated storefronts, PrestaShop handles it with less plugin juggling than WooCommerce.

Reasonable hosting needs

PrestaShop runs on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting. A small store does not need the OpenSearch, Redis and Varnish stack that Magento expects, so a good UK host at £20 to £60 a month is usually enough for a small or mid-sized shop.

Where it falls short for UK businesses

A smaller UK talent pool

Search for WooCommerce developers in Manchester, Bristol or Glasgow and you will find plenty. Search for PrestaShop specialists and the list is short. That has two knock-on effects: fewer people to compare quotes from, and a real risk if your one freelancer moves on. We regularly hear from UK shop owners whose original developer has disappeared and who cannot find anyone to update the store.

Paid modules for the basics

Many features that WooCommerce users get from free, well-maintained plugins are paid modules on PrestaShop. Individual modules typically cost tens to a few hundred euros each, often with support limited to a year. A store with 15 to 25 paid modules has a hidden cost each time it upgrades, because every module needs checking for compatibility and some need buying again.

Fewer UK-specific integrations

Payment modules for Stripe and PayPal exist and work. The gaps show up around UK carriers (Royal Mail Click & Drop, DPD, Evri), UK accounting tools such as Xero or Sage, and UK-focused marketing tools, where modules exist but there are fewer of them and some are maintained by small European developers who are slower to update.

Upgrades take planning

Moving from 1.6 to 8 is effectively a migration. Moving from 1.7 to 8 or 9 is easier with the official upgrade module, but a theme with heavy overrides and older modules can still turn it into a multi-week job.

PrestaShop vs WooCommerce for a UK shop

The verdict for most UK shops: if most of your customers are in the UK and you care about content and organic search, WooCommerce is the easier platform to own. If you sell heavily into several European markets in several languages, PrestaShop has a genuine edge. For a fuller picture including Magento, see our three-way platform comparison.

Setting PrestaShop up properly for the UK

A lot of the PrestaShop stores we inherit were configured by a European developer or from a default install, and the UK details are slightly off. If you are staying, these are worth checking.

VAT. Create a tax rules group for the UK standard rate of 20 %, plus reduced (5 %) and zero-rated groups if you sell children’s clothing, books or other qualifying goods. Decide whether prices are entered including or excluding VAT and stick to it, and check that invoices show your VAT number and the VAT breakdown per line. If you sell into the EU, low-value B2C consignments usually go through the Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS); ask your accountant before you switch it on.

Addresses. Make the postcode field required and validated for the United Kingdom, set the county field to optional (Royal Mail does not need it), and treat Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man as separate delivery zones, since the costs and customs rules differ.

Payments. The official Stripe and PayPal modules both work in the UK and support Apple Pay and Google Pay. Turn on 3D Secure, which UK banks require under Strong Customer Authentication, and test a card that triggers a challenge before you go live. Our Stripe vs PayPal vs GoCardless guide compares the fees.

Speed. Enable PrestaShop’s built-in caching, combine and minify CSS and JavaScript in the performance settings, serve images in WebP, and put Cloudflare in front. A tidy PrestaShop store can pass Core Web Vitals on mobile; a store with 25 modules each loading its own scripts usually cannot.

Stay, upgrade or migrate? A decision checklist

Go through these honestly. They tend to point clearly one way.

Stay on PrestaShop if:

• You are on version 8 or 9 and receiving security updates.
• Your developer is reliable and knows the platform well.
• You sell in several languages or currencies and the multi-store setup earns its keep.
• Your module list is short and every module is still maintained.

Upgrade within PrestaShop if:

• You are on 1.7 and the store is otherwise healthy.
• Your theme is close to standard and you have few custom overrides.
• Your business model will not change much in the next three years.

Migrate to WooCommerce if:

• You are on 1.6, or on 1.7 with a heavily customised theme.
• You cannot find or keep a PrestaShop developer.
• You want a proper blog and landing pages for SEO without workarounds.
• You pay for a long list of modules and every upgrade means rebuying some.
• Your customers are mostly in the UK.

How a PrestaShop to WooCommerce migration works

We have moved stores of a few hundred to tens of thousands of products. The process is similar each time.

1. Audit. Export the product, customer and order counts, list every module, and crawl the live site to capture every URL, including category, product, CMS and image URLs.
2. Map the data. Combinations become WooCommerce variations, features become attributes, customer groups become roles or price lists, cart rules become coupons. Anything that does not map cleanly is agreed with you before we start.
3. Build the new shop. A hand-built WordPress theme, the plugins you need and nothing more, Stripe or your existing payment provider, shipping rules and UK VAT classes.
4. Migrate data. Products, images, categories, customers and order history, using a migration tool plus our own scripts for anything custom. We run it on a staging server first.
5. Redirects. Every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new equivalent. This is where most migrations lose rankings, so we test the redirect map against the crawl, not against a sample.
6. Test. Real orders with real cards, every shipping zone, VAT on invoices, transactional emails, account logins and stock levels.
7. Final sync and launch. A short freeze on new orders, a last delta import, DNS switch, then monitoring Search Console and order flow for the first fortnight.

What about customer passwords?

Recent PrestaShop versions store passwords as bcrypt hashes, and current WordPress versions can verify bcrypt hashes too, so on modern stores customers can often keep logging in as before. Older stores used a different scheme, and those customers will be asked to set a new password on first login. Either way, we write the email that tells them what is happening, so it does not look like a phishing attempt.

What it costs

On our hourly model, e-commerce development is £65 an hour, with volume discounts of 15 % on 20 hours or more and 20 % on 50 hours or more. Prices exclude VAT at 20 %.

The large-store figures use our 25 % discount for blocks of 100 hours or more. If you would rather have a fixed price for the new shop, our Business / E-commerce package is £2,650 plus VAT on the current offer and covers a custom WordPress shop with payments, CMS, multi-language and SEO set-up; data migration from a large catalogue is quoted on top. See the details on our packages page.

If you decide to stay on PrestaShop, the same rates apply to upgrades, module updates and fixes. You can book a block of hours and use them as you need; hours never expire.

Five things to fix on any PrestaShop store, whatever you decide

• Get off version 1.6. It no longer receives security fixes, and an unpatched shop is the easiest target there is.
• Move to a supported PHP version. Old PHP is the second most common risk we see.
• Remove modules you no longer use, rather than just disabling them.
• Set up off-site backups of files and database, and test a restore.
• Enable two-factor authentication or at least a strong, unique password for every back-office account, and change the default admin folder name.

Our view

PrestaShop is a good piece of software that suffers in the UK mainly because of who supports it, not what it does. For a British retailer selling mostly to British customers, WooCommerce is usually cheaper to own and easier to staff. For a multi-language European seller, PrestaShop can be the better tool. We are a small team based in St Albans working with shops across the UK; send us your store URL and version number and we will tell you which path we would take and roughly what it costs. If you are leaning towards WooCommerce, our guide to WooCommerce development for UK shops explains what the new build involves.

Photo: Bench Accounting via Unsplash