Optimizing your PrestaShop friendly URL is essential for boosting both your store’s SEO performance and user experience. Friendly URLs are clean, readable, and easy to navigate, benefiting both search engines and visitors. By following best practices, you can ensure your store’s URLs enhance its visibility and usability. In this guide, we will walk through five steps to ensure success with your PrestaShop friendly URL strategy.
1. Enable PrestaShop Friendly URLs for Clean and Readable Links
The first and most crucial step in optimizing your PrestaShop URLs is to enable the friendly URL feature. Friendly URLs transform long, complex URLs into simple, descriptive ones. They make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages and improve the user experience.
For instance:
Default URL: www.example.com/index.php?id_product=52&controller=product
Friendly URL: www.example.com/leather-jackets
To enable this feature in PrestaShop, go to your admin dashboard, navigate to “SEO & URLs” under the “Shop Parameters” tab, and switch on friendly URLs. By making this small adjustment, you create a more professional appearance for your store, and users can easily understand what each page is about.
2. Customize URLs with Descriptive Keywords
A key best practice is to ensure that your URLs include relevant, descriptive keywords. These keywords should relate to the content of the page, helping both search engines and users understand what to expect before clicking the link. For example:
Bad URL: www.example.com/product-123
Optimized URL: www.example.com/mens-running-shoes
A URL that contains keywords relevant to the product or category increases its SEO value and makes it more likely to rank higher in search results. Keep your URLs simple, and avoid unnecessary characters or numbers.
3. Remove Unnecessary IDs from URLs
PrestaShop often includes product or category IDs in URLs by default, making them longer and less user-friendly. For example, URLs like www.example.com/index.php?id_category=35&controller=category are not ideal for SEO purposes.
To clean up your URLs and remove unnecessary IDs, go to “Preferences” in the PrestaShop dashboard and ensure the “Remove IDs from URLs” option is enabled. Clean URLs without IDs are easier to read and more likely to perform better in search engine rankings.
By removing these IDs, you create more concise URLs that are easier for users to share and remember, which improves the overall user experience.
4. Redirect Old URLs to Maintain SEO Value
If you make significant changes to your URL structure, such as removing IDs or updating URLs to be more descriptive, it’s important to implement 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. A 301 redirect ensures that users who land on the old URLs are seamlessly taken to the updated pages, preventing broken links.
Moreover, this process helps maintain the SEO value of your old URLs. If search engines have already indexed your previous URLs, a 301 redirect signals that the content has moved permanently, preserving your rankings and traffic.
By using 301 redirects, you avoid losing the SEO benefits of your previous URLs while ensuring users and search engines continue to find your pages.
5. Regularly Monitor and Test Your URLs
Once you’ve implemented friendly URLs, it’s important to regularly test and monitor their performance. Use tools like Google Search Console and other SEO auditing platforms to check for any issues such as broken links, duplicate content, or slow loading times.
Ensure that your URLs perform well across all devices, particularly mobile, as Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing. Clean, mobile-friendly URLs help improve site navigation and reduce bounce rates, leading to better SEO performance.
By regularly testing your PrestaShop friendly URL setup, you can identify any areas that need improvement and keep your store’s URLs optimized for both search engines and users.
Conclusion
Optimizing your PrestaShop friendly URL structure is a key component of improving your store’s SEO and user experience. By enabling friendly URLs, customizing them with keywords, removing unnecessary IDs, implementing redirects, and regularly monitoring performance, you can ensure that your store stays competitive in search engine rankings and delivers a smooth, user-friendly shopping experience.
Following these five best practices will not only make your URLs cleaner and more readable but also increase traffic to your store and improve its overall performance.