Everything you need to sell online

Set up an online store in minutes to sell on a website, social media, or marketplaces.

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

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

7 min read

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.

The look of new seo friendly urls in ecwid

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.company.site to see how the new URLs look in practice.

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!

Enabling seo urls for ecwid and wordpress websites

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.

New SEO friendly URLs in Ecwid for Joomla

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


 

Table of contents

Sell online

With Ecwid Ecommerce, you can easily sell anywhere, to anyone — across the internet and around the world.

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.

Ecommerce that has your back

So simple to use – even my most technophobic clients can manage. Easy to install, quick to set up. Light years ahead of other shop plugins.
I’m so impressed I’ve recommended it to my website clients and am now using it for my own store along with four others for which I webmaster. Beautiful coding, excellent top-notch support, great documentation, fantastic how-to videos. Thank you so much Ecwid, you rock!
I’ve used Ecwid and I love the platform itself. Everything is so simplified it’s insane. I love how you have different options to choose shipping carriers, to be able to put in so many different variants. It’s a pretty open e-commerce gateway.
Easy to use, affordable (and a free option if starting off). Looks professional, many templates to select from. The App is my favorite feature as I can manage my store right from my phone. Highly recommended 👌👍
I like that Ecwid was easy to start and to use. Even for a person like me, without any technical background. Very well written help articles. And the support team is the best for my opinion.
For everything it has to offer, ECWID is incredibly easy to set up. Highly recommend! I did a lot of research and tried about 3 other competitors. Just try ECWID and you'll be online in no time.

Your ecommerce dreams start here

By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.
Your Privacy

When you visit any website, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you, your preferences or your device and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to. The information does not usually directly identify you, but it can give you a more personalized web experience. Because we respect your right to privacy, you can choose not to allow some types of cookies. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings. However, blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. More information

More information

Strictly Necessary Cookies (Always active)
These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not then work. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable information.
Targeting Cookies
These cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.
Functional Cookies
These cookies enable the website to provide enhanced functionality and personalisation. They may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages. If you do not allow these cookies then some or all of these services may not function properly.
Performance Cookies
These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources, so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies, we will not know when you have visited our site.