The “Stuck at 43%” Nightmare: Why the PrestaShop Upgrade Module Failed (And Why “Rollback” Won’t Save You)

By Christian Fillion E-Commerce Strategist & Founder, Marketing Media

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It is a scene we encounter almost every week.

You decided to trust the “1-Click Upgrade” module. You clicked the button. The green progress bar started moving. 10%… 25%… 43%. And then, it stopped.

You waited 5 minutes. You waited an hour. It hasn’t moved. You refresh the page. Panic. Your store is down. The back office is inaccessible. And when you try to use the “Rollback” feature to undo the damage, that fails too.

You are now the owner of a “Zombie Store”—half alive, half dead, and completely unusable.

Here is the technical autopsy of what just happened, and how to survive it.

1. The Culprit: The “Time-Out” Guillotine

Why did it stop at 43%?

The Upgrade Module is a PHP script. It has to replace thousands of files and execute hundreds of database commands. However, your web server (Apache or Nginx) has a safety limit called max_execution_time. Usually, it is set to 30 or 60 seconds.

If the upgrade script takes 61 seconds to run (which it almost always does on a large store), the server thinks the script has hung and kills it instantly.

• The Result: The process is severed mid-surgery.
• The State: Your file system has half of PrestaShop 8 and half of PrestaShop 1.7. They are incompatible. The site crashes.

2. The “Rollback” Myth

“But,” you say, “I selected the option to create a Backup before upgrading!”

The problem is the Restore Mechanism. To restore the backup, the module needs to run a new script to unzip the files and reverse the database changes.

• The Trap: If your server killed the Upgrade script because it was too slow/heavy, it will almost certainly kill the Restore script for the same reason.

You are trapped in a loop. You cannot go forward, and you cannot go back, because the tool you are using is too weak for the job.

3. The Only Way Out: Manual Intervention

If you are stuck in this state, stop clicking buttons. You will only corrupt the database further.

Recovery requires a surgical approach outside of PrestaShop:

1. FTP/SSH Restore: We have to log into the server directly (bypassing PrestaShop) and manually delete the corrupted “Zombie” files. We then verify the integrity of the backup zip file (if it wasn’t corrupted too) and unzip it manually using command-line tools.
2. Database Rollback: We access the database via phpMyAdmin. We drop the corrupted tables and import the SQL backup file directly.
3. The “CLI” Upgrade (The Pro Way): Once we revive the site, we do not use the browser to upgrade again. We use the Command Line Interface (CLI).
   • Why? The CLI does not have a “Timeout” limit. We can run a command like php module:upgrade, and it will run for 2 hours if necessary until it finishes perfectly.

Don’t perform surgery on yourself.

The “1-Click Upgrade” is a marketing gimmick. For any store with real data, real customers, and real revenue, an upgrade is a complex migration.

If your progress bar is stuck, call us immediately.

We can usually rescue a Zombie Store if we catch it early enough.

Download our [5-Point Profitability Audit] to see if your server is strong enough for an upgrade, or schedule an Emergency Recovery below.

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