With the introduction of the friendly URL and customized URL, PrestaShop revolutionized the control of URLs in its update PrestaShop v1.5. Later in the PrestaShop v1.7, it added the feature of URL dispatcher to enhance the URL rewriting in PrestaShop. With this update, PrestaShop made the URL rewriting or URL customization for modules very easy.
An SEO URL structure is a special customized URL which simplifies the complex structure of the URL to a very simple and easy to understand structure.
For example :
Say you have new module called “yourmodule”. Let say it has two main functions.
1. Page list of commands for any user
2. Using “yourmodule” to see the order details.
Now if the friendly URL is Disabled, you will see your page list URL something like this:
https://www.yourrstore.com/index.php?fc=module&module=monmodule&controller=orders&module_action=listing
If Friendly URL is enabled you will see the same page list with this URL:
https://www.yourrstore.com/module/monmodule/orders?module_action=listing
As we can see that the second case presents the more simplified and understandable URL structure and this is because of the Friendly URL being active on your site.
Friendly URLs are nice to have on your site. A clean, SEO friendly URL is more understandable and easily readable by the search engines. Adopting a friendly URL is one of the pre-development SEO approaches.
How to get the Friendly URL for your front controller pages?
Follow these simple steps to get an SEO Friendly URL for your module controller:
Step 1: Login to your Back office.
Step 2: Navigate to Preferences>>SEO & URLs
Step 3: You will see the configuration page “SEO & URLs”.You will see the list of front pages, Page Title, and their URL.
Something like the below screenshot:
Step 4: Now, click on “Add new Page” as shown in the screenshot below:
You will be redirected to a page which looks something like below:
Step 5: When you click on the tab “Page”, it will open a drop down list of all the pages that are created on your website. Select the page from the list for which you want to rewrite the URL.
Step 6: Enter the details asked in the form above and also mention your custom URL in the “Rewritten URL” tab. Click “Save” to store your settings.
You have done the the task of rewriting the URL after you saved the form. But in some cases you will need to perform the following additional operations.
1. Clear the cache: Sometimes cache won’t let the new URL show on the front end. To avoid this you need to go to Advance Parameter>>Performance and clear the cache from there.
2. Make sure in Preferences >> SEO & URLs >> SET UP URLS, the “Friendly URL is turned on”. You can also disable the “Accented URL”; it’s optional.
An alternate way of implementing SEO-friendly URL
Knowband offers an alternative and easier method of making the URLs of your store user-friendly. PrestaShop SEO Optimizer – Clean URLs & 301/302/303 redirection Module offered by Knowband IDs from all the URLs of the stores in one go. By removing the product and category ID, the links of the landing pages becomes SEO optimized. Additionally, you can even remove the default ISO and .html from the links without making any manual changes. Not just this, you can retrieve the list of the URLs redirected to a new link or the links that are redirecting to 404 error by using PrestaShop 301/302/303 Redirect.
What are the features offered by Knowband’s Prestashop URL cleaner addon?
Some of the admin features offered by this Prestashop SEO optimizer extension are mentioned below:
- With PrestaShop SEO URL Addon, you can optimize the URLs of your site from SEO point-of-view and improve the website ranking in the Google SERP results.
- No manual changes are required to be done with PrestaShop SEO Friendly URL module.
- The Prestashop addon lists out the URLs that have 301/302/303 redirection as well as the links that redirects to 404 error.
- You can remove .html and default ISO from the URLs if required with Prestashop SEO Friendly URL extension.
Why you should have SEO-friendly URLs?
Having discussed the various ways of implementing SEO-optimized URL, the question of why you need to have one in the first place might come to your mind. So, listed below are some of the reasons for the same.
URLs with a structured hierarchy are preferred by GoogleBot. Such URLs make it easier for the crawler to crawl pages throughout the site.
If you links with structured hierarchy, then, the webpages will get indexed easily. Not just this, such pages are displayed in search results faster.
Even in case of indexed links, the recrawling becomes easier.
With a SEO friendly URL structure, it becomes easier to promote your site.
Moreover, it is a preferred option from the end-users’ point-of-view. It is easier for the user to remember the links of the landing pages.
So, here we learned that how we can rewrite the URL of any front page on our PrestaShop site. The support for Friendly URLs is really a nice feature in PrestaShop which also acts used as a competitive advantage against other CMS systems.