If you run a PrestaShop store, you are probably investing in your offer, photos, descriptions, and marketing. And yet in Google it often happens that the competition “looks better”: they have rating stars, a number of reviews, sometimes additional elements in the search result, while your store is displayed as a regular link. Often the reason is simple – properly implemented Schema.org structured data is missing, or it has been implemented in an incomplete, inconsistent, or duplicated way.

In PrestaShop, product images are not just “graphics for a nice look”. They have a real impact on SEO (Core Web Vitals, indexing, traffic from Google Images), conversion (clear thumbnails, fast loading), and store stability (correct image types after changing the theme or settings). The problem is that image regeneration in larger stores can take hours or end in errors—especially when the process relies on many short PHP calls, where each step rebuilds the entire PrestaShop environment from scratch.

In Smarty templates in PrestaShop, a rich set of environment variables is available, reflecting the current context of the store’s operation. They provide easy access to information about the current language, currency, country, customer, cart, as well as the store itself and its configuration – without the need to resort to PHP code.

Thanks to them, you can dynamically adjust the appearance and behavior of the front end to regional settings, user preferences, or the contents of the cart. These variables are automatically passed to templates by the PrestaShop engine and form the basis for building flexible, multilingual, and multicurrency themes and modules.