Make characteristics required

Hi,

For the required selection and the "Please select" text, you don't need to add a value for it. Go to System > Configuration, Display tab, and set "Characteristics dynamic display" to "Always". With that on:
- every characteristic starts on a real "Please select" entry and nothing is preselected,
- the add to cart button stays hidden until all the characteristics have been chosen, so they become required,
- each dropdown is filtered to only the still valid options as the customer picks, so no invalid combination can be selected.

So you can remove the "Please select" value you added manually. If you want to change the wording, it comes from the PLEASE_SELECT language string and can be edited with a Joomla language override.

About the slow loading, that setting will not fix it, because the weight of the page does not come from the "Please select" approach, it comes from the number of variants. Your product has 4 characteristics with 6, 59, 3 and 4 values, which is 6 x 59 x 3 x 4 = 4248 variants. HikaShop has to output the data of every combination whose price, image or description differs from the main product, and that is what makes the page very heavy (around 15 MB here).

The 59-value characteristic is what multiplies everything. The real way to speed up the page is to lower the number of combinations. If that axis (the mattress) is an add-on that is independent from the bed itself, it is better not to make it a characteristic:
- sell it as a separate product (cross sell / related product), or
- use a product option instead of a characteristic, or
- use a custom item field if it does not change the price or the stock.

Characteristics multiply with each other, options and custom fields do not. Moving the mattress out of the characteristics would bring you from 4248 variants down to 72, and that is what will actually make the page fast.

Hi,

No. The point of this mode is that the values in the hidden dropdowns will update after the previous one is selected in order to leave only the available values.
For example, suppose you sell a T-shirt with the size XL and the color blue available, and the size L and the color red available.
First, you can select between red and blue. Once done, you get the size dropdown and it will only give you XL if you selected blue, or only L if you selected red. So you can't select unavailable variants with this system.