Magento is a fantastic platform for selling online, arguably the best, but there’s one thing that has always left me frustrated as an SEO… That pesky index.php directory in the URL of ALL internal pages – nightmare!
There’s no benefit to them.
They’re bad for SEO, bad for site structure and consistency, and then they’re even worse for a clean URL freak like me. They’re not sexy enough. Let’s clean things up.
SEO Friendly Magento URLs in Two Steps
Fortunately, whilst I was doing a Magento store for a client recently, I did a little bit of digging and found a pretty straightforward solution to the issue. It involves a couple of changes to the Magento admin settings and the addition, or modification, of a simple .htaccess file to sort out of the rewriting of their standard store URLs.
Follow the simple steps below and you’ll be a step closer to SEO success with your own Magento store, and your SEO won’t have an excuse for decreased relevancy.
1) Let’s Change a Setting, Admin
The first thing you need to do is to login to your Magento admin panel (index.php/admin) in order to change a very simple setting which will let Magento know that you intend to use URL rewriting throughout your store rather than their ugly default URLs.
Login, and change this setting:
Go to System > Configuration > Web > Search Engine Optimization
Use Web Server Rewrites: YES
That was easy, wasn’t it? Okay, now for the final step.
2) Let’s Use a .htaccess File to Rewrite the URLs
The final step involves creating a .htaccess file in the Magento installation folder in order to compliment the settings you changed within your admin settings earlier, and this will actually rewrite the URLs. Choose the applicable .htaccess version below.
If your Magento store is installed in root (public_html), use this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
If your Magento store is installed in a subfolder (public_html/shop), use this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /shop/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /shop/index.php [L]
You’re done – hope that helps!
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