The Best Ways to Enable Friendly URLs in Prestashop 1.7 and Above

It is difficult to rank your Prestashop store without user-friendly URLs. Such URLs are well-structured and easy for users to read and remember. Plus, they allow search engines to understand the page’s content better. 

Speaking of which, this interesting blog post is all about letting you understand what Prestashop-friendly URLs look like and how you can make your store’s URLs better. So, without further ado, let’s get started. 

What are Friendly URLs

These are web addresses that are easy to read, remember, and share. They are well-structured and usually have an important keyword related to the content of the page. 

Friendly URLs are important because they help both users and search engines to understand what a specific page is all about. 

The Elements of a Friendly URL

A URL of your Prestashop store page is user-friendly when it has the following features: 

1. Contains a keyword related to the page content
2. It is concise
3. Uses hyphens (-) to separate different words
4. It is entirely in lowercase 
5. It doesn’t have any special characters that would cause confusions 

How to Make Prestashop Store’s URLs Friendly

You have two options to enable friendly URLs in your Prestashop 1.7 or above. 

1. Using Pretty Url 

The first one is to use the innovative Prestashop Pretty Url Module by FME, which will automatically clean your URLs without requiring any technical expertise. That’s why most of the successful Prestashop store owners opt for this option. 

Try The Prestashop Pretty URL Now

2. Manually Setting Up The Store’s Settings 

This one is a bit lengthy, but it is effective if you don’t want to use the module right now. At some stage, you have to use the Pretty Url Module, as the manual method won’t automate a few things, like removing IDs and more. 

Let’s understand how you can enable Prestashop-friendly URLs manually using the back-end store settings: 

1. Log in to your Prestashop store and locate the shop parameters option, which will be available in Configure settings. 
2. In shop parameters, you will be able to see the Traffic and SEO option; click on that. 
3. You will have three tabs, namely, SEO & Urls, Search Engines, and Refferrs. Just stay in the SEO & URLs tab and click on Yes to enable Friendly URL.

 

4. Once you enable the Friendly Urls option, you will be able to see the Schema of Urls. 

5. For ease of understanding, let’s imagine we are selling t-shirts on our Prestashop-based store. One of our store URLs looks like this:

https://website.com/men/3-6-black-green-designed-poloshirt.html#1-size-m  

Although the URL is descriptive, it is not easily understandable for users and search engines. So, we will refine it as follows: 

Route to products:

{category:/}{id}{-:id_product_attribute}-{rewrite}{-:ean13}.html

The link looks like this:

men/3-6-black-green-designed-poloshirt.html#1-size-m

Remove the .html so that it will not add on all of the URLs.

Change the ID position and delete the HTML: 

{category:/}{rewrite}{-:id_product_attribute}-{id}

Now the URL is:

men/black-green-designed-poloshirt-3-6#/1-size-M

Your URL is more user-friendly and also good for SEO purposes. 

Did You Notice? 

By default, all the Prestashop store pages will place ID at the start of the URL. Plus, it is time-consuming to manually edit and replace URLs for all pages. That’s where the Prestashop Pretty URL Module comes in handy. Such a module will automatically remove extra IDs and restructure your URL so it makes more sense to the users and search engines. That’s why it could be part of the secret tips of Prestashop SEO you are looking for. 

Take Away

Without proper URLs, it will be difficult for users and search engines to understand your e-commerce website content. Hard navigation also means that a search engine won’t be able to show your pages to relevant queries by potential customers. Hence, it is a big SEO risk so you better resolve it ASAP. For that, we have presented two solutions in this interesting blog post, which we hope helped improve your site URLs.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) 

1. What Are The Characteristics of a Prestashop-Friendly URL? 

To be user-friendly, your Prestashop store URLs must be: 

       - Descriptive (Tells what a page is all about) 

       - Short (Not more than a few characters)

       - Must have a keyword (Related to the content of the page)

2. Are Long URLS Bad for SEO? 

Of course, if your page URL is not well-structured, it will be difficult for crawlers to understand what this spot is all about. Hence, it won’t show in the relevant searches by potential customers. So, long URLS aren’t bad as long as they are understandable. 

3. What Is An Example of Prestashop Friendly URL?  

Here’s an example of an excellent URL for a Prestashop store selling t-shirts: 

https://website.com/products/men/poloshirts/