Store sitemap is a great way to speed up your site indexing on Google. It is an excellent addition to your SEO, especially if your store is very active; meaning you are constantly listing new products or unlisting them.
PrestaShop has an official and free Google Sitemap addon. You can generate a Sitemap for your store listing categories, products, and custom pages.
But this time, I want to show some good practices around that topic and SEO and this is what I am going to discuss in in this article.
- How to Generate Sitemap for Your PrestaShop Store
- Two Big Problems With Default PrestaShop Sitemap
- How to Submit Sitemap to Google Search Console
- Other Tools to Generate PrestaShop Sitemap
- Do You Need Sitemap for PrestaShop
- Conclusion
How to Generate Sitemap for Your PrestaShop Store
- Log into the back office, click Modules → Module Manager, and search for the
sitemapkeyword. - On the opened page, you will see lots of checkboxes and the button
Generate Sitemap.
You might think that you need to check all the checkboxes – please do not do that. Don’t check anything at all; just click on the Generate Sitemap button to generate one with links to pages, categories, and products.
More pages in your sitemap do not mean you will have a better SEO ranking. Google says you should have only “valuable” content. Cart pages, privacy policies, or terms pages are considered “useless” or generic pages.
Two Big Problems With Default PrestaShop Sitemap
There are two significant issues when you hit Generate Sitemap button from the Sitemap Addon configuration page.
First, it will put your Sitemap into a weirdly-looking URL:
example.org/1_index_sitemap.xml.
Not only is this weird, but hardly a guessable filename. Also, it contains links to other files, so it is hard to use.
Fortunately, that format is easily recognizable for Google to follow. But Google won’t use your Sitemap until you submit one. Read the next section for details on that.
Another big problem is that generation is a one-time action and is not automatic. Fortunately, most hostings will support CRON entries, and if you follow the advice from the bottom on that addon – you could fix it.
How to Submit Sitemap to Google Search Console
Open Google Search Console and create a new property if you haven’t done so.
It will ask you to enter some details about your store and suggest actions to validate the property.
Next, go to the Sitemaps page and submit the URL you have received after clicking Generate Sitemap button.
That’s all. Your Sitemap will be reviewed in 2-3 days, and the indexed pages report will become available.
Other Tools to Generate PrestaShop Sitemap
You don’t need to use the PrestaShop sitemap generator. You can use online tools for free like xml-sitemaps. If you use them, don’t forget to upload generated file to your server into the root directory of PrestaShop.
Do You Need Sitemap for PrestaShop
Not really, but you need to ping Google so that they start crawling your store. Register to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. That is enough to get your site indexed in the next 2-5 days.
In the earlier years, having a Sitemap is an advantage to getting your pages indexed faster. Today, Google has some validation rules for every page they scan, and if your URL will show up in Sitemap quicker – this does not mean anything.
But Sitemap in Google Search Console can report any errors (inaccessible pages, infected pages, and so on.) So Sitemap is optional, but using Google Search Console is mandatory.
Conclusion
If you want to have better SEO rankings, be sure to follow our PrestaShop Marketing Blog.