An online store can use two kinds of URLs — dynamic and human-readable.
Dynamic URLs are formed from a query to the store’s database. A typical product page URL of this kind looks like http://www.example.com/cart.php?target=product&product_id=31. URLs like this are hard for people to read and remember, and search engines rank them lower than descriptive ones.
Human-readable, or “clean”, URLs — as they’re called in X-Cart — are SEO-friendly addresses used instead of dynamic ones. They’re built from the page’s name, so the same product page becomes something like http://www.example.com/product/cup-of-mojo-bluetooth-speaker.
Your store uses clean URLs by default, so you have full control over what a page’s address says to your customers.
How clean URLs look in your version of X-Cart
The exact structure depends on the X-Cart version:
X-Cart 5.6.x — every page type has a fixed prefix:
/product/{clean-url},/category/{clean-url},/brand/{clean-url},/page/{clean-url}, and so on. Category URLs are flat (no parent categories in the path), and there’s no.htmlextension. See SEO-friendly URLs in X-Cart 5.6.x.X-Cart 5.5.1.x and 5.4.x — product URLs are at the root,
/{clean-url}, and category URLs include the parent categories,/{parent}/{category}/. The format (with or without.html, with or without the parent category) is configurable. See Tweaking SEO-Friendly URLs in X-Cart 5.4.x.
Editing a page’s clean URL
You can set the clean URL of any product, category, brand, or content page in the Admin area:
Leave Autogenerate Clean URL enabled (the default) to have X-Cart build the clean URL from the page’s name every time you save the page.
Disable Autogenerate Clean URL and edit the Clean URL field directly to set your own value. The Result line below the field shows the full address the page will have.
Clean URLs require URL rewriting to be enabled on your web server. If clean URLs don’t work in your store, see SEO-Friendly URLs: Server Setup & Troubleshooting.
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