New Clean URLs for Every Ecwid Store: a Simple Way to a Better SEO

Posted 7 years ago by Matt Kuritsyn, Ecwid Team

SEO is important for any e-commerce merchant. That’s why we are working on the set of SEO improvements to make your stores indexed better in Google, and eventually get more organic traffic to your site.

We have just made another step in this direction and released search engine-friendly URLs for Ecwid stores.

Now URLs are simple, clean of unnecessary characters, and more understandable by both humans and search engines. The easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines, and the better your ranking will get.

The new clean URLs are available for all Ecwid stores. In this post, you’ll know what is cool about this new feature and how to enable new URLs in your store depending on where you sell: on Ecwid Instant Sites, Wix, WordPress or other platforms and site builders.

What’s Good About New URLs in Ecwid

Ecwid generates URLs automatically, based on your product and category names. These links used to be long and indistinct. Now we have made them shorter and compelling.

Let’s see how the links’ structure changed and how exactly that influences a better SEO ranking:

No hashes. The new URLs do not contain the hash sign (“#”), which, according to Google, makes your store better indexed by Google.
Fewer extra characters like /, ~ or’!’. There is a number of text characters (such as < > # % { } | \ ^ ~ [ ] `) that become nasty bits of hard-to-read cruft when inserted in the URL string. We got rid of them in new SEO-friendly URLs.
Other store pages’ URLs also became cleaner, e.g. cart and checkout pages are now easily accessible on /cart and /checkout.
Fast-loading store pages. The store pages with new URLs work without page reload, as it’s always worked in Ecwid. So you have your fast-loading store pages with new, SEO-friendly URLs.

Take a tour around surfparadise.ecwid.com to see how the new URLs look in practice.

surfparadise.ecwid.com

Pro tip: Pay attention to your product and category names because they will be used in links. For a better ranking, try to use keywords when naming your products and categories.

How to Enable New SEO URLs in Ecwid

The manner of enabling new SEO-friendly URLs in your Ecwid store depends on the kind of website it’s built on.

For Ecwid Instant Sites

New URLs are enabled automatically for merchants who use new-generation Instant Sites.

If you use an old version of the Instant Site and want to enable the new URLs, please switch to the new version of the Instant Site in your Ecwid Control Panel — it’s free.

In order to do that, open the What’s new page in your Control Panel and enable the New & Improved Instant Site: Build & Customize your Store option. The new URLs will be automatically enabled once you switch to the new version of the Instant Site.

For Wix websites

If you use Ecwid for your Wix website, new SEO-friendly URLs are already enabled automatically. You don’t have to set anything up.

For WordPress websites

It’s very easy to enable new SEO URLs on WordPress websites: navigate to the Ecwid plugin’s advanced settings and tick the SEO-friendly URLs checkbox. Make sure you’ve updated your Ecwid plugin to the latest version. Done!

For Joomla websites

To get the clean URLs for your Ecwid store on Joomla, please update your Ecwid Joomla plugin to the latest version (v.3) and find the new clean URL option on the Ecwid component settings → Advanced page in your Joomla admin.

For custom-made websites and other site builders

It’s also possible to enable clean URLs manually on your custom-made website. This will require a few changes in the Ecwid integration code and server setup.

We’ve shared examples of clean URLs setup on custom made websites in the post on GitHub. They will be helpful for those who develop custom websites.

For more details, head to Ecwid API documentation.

If you are not sure how to add those changes to your website, please refer to your site builder/hosting support or your developer. If you have a question on this, let us know which platform your site is running on and we will provide instructions on how to proceed.

I don’t have access to server settings

If you:

Use a site builder that doesn’t allow you to rewrite site URLs on the server
Cannot access .htaccess file on your hosting

Please follow our instructions to enable special SEO-URLs for your Ecwid store.

The Old URLs Continue Working

If you decided to go for new SEO URLs in your Ecwid store, note that the old URLs will continue working to make sure no customer gets lost.

If someone opens a product catalog or proceeds to checkout in your store using an old URL, it will work and you won’t lose your visitors.

This is also true for all the links to your store in sitemaps, marketplaces, social posts, and ads. We are not going to stop supporting old URLs, so you don’t have to worry about your traffic.

Over to You

New SEO-friendly URLs in your Ecwid store are a powerful tool for better ranking, more traffic, and a higher click-through rate.

Please feel free to ask your questions in the comments section below — we are always ready to help you with setting this up.

For more SEO tips for your Ecwid store, be sure to read our article: Manual Meta Tags: a Better SEO Now in Your Store

About The Author

Matt is a product manager at Ecwid. He works with the Ecwid dev team and helps them shipping the right features for Ecwid merchants. Outside of work, Matt likes travelling and climbing the mountains.