The PrestaShop Back Office is organised into eight main menus covering catalogue, orders, customers, shipping, configuration and analytics. For a UK merchant running a SmartXHosting PrestaShop store, the daily workflow touches only three of them. This guide walks through the layout, explains what each major section does, and highlights the settings that matter most in the first month.
The Dashboard • The eight main menus • Top bar and global actions • Multishop selector and scope • Common daily tasks • Symfony-based screens in PrestaShop 9 • FAQ
The Dashboard is your landing screen after login. PrestaShop 9 shows five widgets:
The dashboard is read-only — click a customer name or product title to jump to detail screens. For stores with multiple brands, the Multishop selector in the top toolbar filters the Dashboard to one shop.
Orders, Invoices, Credit Slips, Delivery Slips, Shopping Carts, Customers, Addresses, Stats (analytics). The highest-traffic menu: orders and customers live here. Most UK admins spend the first hour of each day in Sell › Orders reviewing the overnight queue.
Modules (extensions marketplace), Design (themes, pages, positions), Shipping (carriers, preferences), Payment (payment methods), International (localisation, taxes, currencies), Modules catalog. PrestaShop separates “sell” from “improve” to keep daily workflow separate from configuration.
Shop Parameters, Advanced Parameters. Deep technical settings — general shop info, product settings, customer settings, order settings, database backup, logs, performance, cron tasks, webservice, information.
Products, Categories, Monitoring, Attributes & Features, Brands & Suppliers, Files, Discounts, Stocks. Everything about the catalogue. Much of the creation work happens here; see Managing Products and Managing Categories.
The top bar stretches across the Back Office and is always visible:
If multistore is enabled (Advanced Parameters › Multistore), a selector appears in the top bar letting you scope the current screen to one shop, a shop group or all shops. Most settings can be customised per shop — language, currency, theme, product visibility.
For a single-brand UK store, multistore stays disabled and the selector does not appear. Enable it only if you add a second brand or a separate trade site sharing the same installation.
Morning routine:
Weekly tasks:
PrestaShop 9 has migrated all core Back Office screens to Symfony — the underlying framework that powers modern PHP applications. For admins this change is mostly invisible but carries two practical implications:
Caveat: some third-party modules written for PrestaShop 8 are not yet fully Symfony-compatible for 9. Check module compatibility before installing anything from the community marketplace.
PrestaShop 9 on infrastructure tuned for speed
Redis caching and PHP 8.2 on SmartXHosting PrestaShop plans keep the Symfony-based Back Office snappy. UK support for module compatibility questions.
View PrestaShop plansQ: Why are some menu items greyed out?
A: Employee profile permissions restrict access. A SuperAdmin sees everything; scoped profiles hide irrelevant sections. Check Advanced Parameters › Team › Profiles.
Q: I changed a setting but the storefront still shows the old value.
A: Clear the cache under Advanced Parameters › Performance › Clear Cache. Redis on SmartXHosting is fast; the clear completes in a second or two.
Q: Where is the Module Manager?
A: Improve › Modules › Module Manager. This is where you enable, disable and configure every module. The Marketplace tab inside it is where you browse new modules to install.
Q: How do I quickly find a specific setting?
A: The global search in the top bar searches admin URLs, customers, orders and products. For a deeply-nested setting, type part of its name — “tax inclusive” or “SSL” — and it jumps to the configuration page.
Q: Can I customise the Dashboard?
A: Drag widgets to reposition. Under each widget’s gear icon, you can hide it. The Dashboard module itself (“Dashboard Products”, “Dashgoals”) can be disabled under Improve › Modules.
Q: The Back Office is slow on large product lists.
A: Turn on list pagination under your profile preferences. Large lists — 10,000+ products — benefit from OpenSearch integration for admin product search, available via paid modules.
Q: How do I see what customers are currently browsing?
A: Sell › Stats › Live Visitors. Shows currently-active shoppers with their cart contents.