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There are other individual pages in your PrestaShop install that would certainly benefit from friendly URLs: CMS pages, user account pages, pages with automatically generated content... The "SEO & URLs" page presents you with a list of these pages, and enables you to edit their friendly URLs as well as their meta tags (title, description, keyword).

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Warning

Friendly URLs only work with a server setup that supports URL rewriting (through the Apache Web Server mod_rewrite feature, for instance). Make sure to check that your server does (ask your hosting provider!), as it can make your shop completely unavailable to customers if you enable friendly URLs and the server does not support it!

Info
titleHomepage SEO settings

In order to change the homepage meta tags, you simply need to open the "SEO & URLs" page, open the "index" page's settings, and there you can freely edit some important SEO information.

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A few tips:

  • The default homepage title is the name of the store, and therefore the index' title field is empty. If you put content in the field, the homepage's full title will be "<your content> – <the name of the store>".
    The name of the store itself is set during the installation of PrestaShop, and can be changed from the "Store Contacts" preference page, using the "Shop name" option of the "Contact details" section.
  • Keep your description short: a paragraph of text is enough.
  • To add a tag, click in the "Add tag" field and validate by pressing return. You can remove tags by clicking the cross.
  • You do not have to add a rewritten URL if there is not already one.

Note that if your store has already been indexed by Google or any other search engine, it might take a while for your changes to appear in the search results. Please be patient.

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Tip

Make sure to fill the fields for all the available languages on your shop: not only is it immensely useful to local users, but some search engines can even make use of this local information.

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Click the "Add New" button to reach the friendly URL creation form. It has a handful of fields:

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  • Friendly URL. Change this option if you know that your server can support URL rewriting. If not, leave it at "No".

    Note

    You may see a message such as "URL rewriting (mod_rewrite) is not active on your server or it is not possible to check your server configuration. If you want to use Friendly URLs you must activate this mod". In this case, PrestaShop cannot detect your server settings, but that does not mean the feature will not work. You must test it yourself.

  • Accented URL. PrestaShop is now able to produce URL with special characters, for products with non ASCII names. You can disable that option here.
  • Redirect to Canonical URL. A given PrestaShop page can have many URLs, most often when there are parameters to consider: for instance, http://example.com/product.php?id=5&option1 and http://example.com/product.php?id=5&option2 point to the very same product, only one difference. Since you want your product to have a single URL and not many duplicate ones, you should enable Canonical URLs.
    Canonical URLs are a way to eliminate self-created duplicate content – which can dramatically bring your search engine rank down, as this is considered spam. To avoid search engines thinking you are spamming their index, PrestaShop uses standard rel="canonical" link tag to indicate which is the one base URL for a given content.
    While it is highly recommended to enable this option, it also depends on your theme actually implementing correctly the <link> header tag. Ask the theme designer for more information.
    There are three options:
    • No redirection. You might get duplicate URLs.
    • 301 Move Permanently. Returns the HTTP 301 status code, pointing to the main URL and notifying search engines that this is the only URL to take into account.
    • 302 Moved Temporarily. Returns the HTTP 302 status code, pointing to the main URL and notifying search engines that the main URL might change later.
  • Disable Apache's MultiViews option. Apache is the most popular web server, and is most likely the one your web host uses for your site (although you should check this for yourself). Multiviews is a content negotiation system: when enabled, the web server tries to serve the user a page in what it thinks is the best matching language version, under the same URL. Unfortunately, this might bring trouble to PrestaShop's friendly URLs feature. If this is the case, you can try to disable multiviews with this option.
  • Disable Apache's mod_security module. mod_security is a module of the Apache web server, which acts as a firewall, protecting your server from intrusions. It can however block some key features, or even produce errors in some configuration. In such case, disable that firewall here.

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Info

In previous version of PrestaShop, you had to manually generate a new .htaccess file after having enabled friendly URLs. This is no longer the case since version 1.5: the .htaccess file is now silently managed by PrestaShop, and you do not have to worry about it.

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Most of the time, you should not touch these fields without knowing exactly what you are doing. One mistake could break your shop.


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Schema of URLs

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8 fields are available by default, and each is accompanied with a list of available keywords. Some keywords are mandatory, and are indicated with a *.

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Once you have updated your fields, do not forget to save your changes, then on the "Save" button in the "Set up URLs" section in order to regenerate your .htaccess file, which is necessary for your friendly URLs.

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Clicking on the "Generate robots.txt" button replaces any existing robots.txt file with a new one. Therefore, if you want to add your own rules, do it after PrestaShop has generated its version of the file.

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