25 SEO best practices for Opencart 4 & 3 with free SEO Opencart module

We list out 25 free best practices for SEO for Opencart 4 and 3

1. Rename the .htaccess.txt to .htaccess

   Go to your hosting root folder where Opencart is installed find .htaccess.txt and rename it to .htaccess

2. Admin Setting section changes for the SEO

   - Go to Admin >> System >> Settings >> Edit your store
   - In the General tab, enter the Meta Title, Meta Tag Description, and Meta Tag Keywords, they are for the Home page of your store website.
   - Go to the Server tab, and Choose Yes for "Use SEO URLs"

3. Enable the sitemap extension

   Go to Admin >> Extensions >> Extensions >> Choose the extension type >> Feeds then install the Google Sitemap extension and then edit it change the status to "Enabled" and save it. Now your sitemap URL will be given there which looks like this:
   https://yourwebsiteurl.com/index.php?route=extension/feed/google_sitemap

4. Submit the sitemap to Google webmasters and Bing webmasters

   Create a Google Webmasters account and a Bing Webmaster account and submit the above sitemap URL in them.

5. Create robots.txt in the root folder where Opencart is installed, and in that robots.txt place the following text, here change the sitemap URL to your website URL

   
   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /admin
   Sitemap: https://yourwebsiteurl.com/index.php?route=extension/feed/google_sitemap

6. Opencart supports canonical URLs automatically, be sure to check it, and it removes the duplicate content penalties.

   https://yourwebsiteurl.com/cateogryname/productname and https://yourwebsiteurl.com/productname, these both URLs point to the same product page, so Google may take it as duplicate content so canonical URLs need to be set up. One example when you view the source the code you will see the canonical URL something like the below:
   
   

7. Product name and Description - Content is the key for Search Engines

   - Product description, as best practices for SEO, you should aim to write at least 300 words but be clear and write as much as possible.
   - Name the images as the product name, in Opencart most of the images' alt tags are either product name in the product page, category name in category image, and so on.
   -

8. Enter SEO information for Products, Categories, Information pages, and Manufacturers.

   To enter the Products' SEO information, go to Admin >> Catalog >> Products >> Add/Edit >>, then in the General tab, enter the meta tag title, meta tag description, and meta tag keywords. Likewise, go to the SEO tab and enter the keyword for each store.
   While entering the Meta Tag title, consider the following best practices:
   - Google only shows around 50–60 characters of a title tag so make the title tag around 50-60 characters
   - Put important keywords in the title and meta description
   While entering the Meta Tag Description, consider the following best practices:
   - 160 characters long
   - We have seen search engines always do not pick the meta descriptions but enter them.
   - Better not to include double quotation marks
   While entering the SEO keyword:
   - Include the main keyword or product name and better to use lowercase and not the prepositions words
   - Better not to use underscore (_), instead use dashes (-)
   - Better not to include double quotation marks or single quotation and special characters
   
   Follow same for Admin >> Catalog >> Categories and Admin >> Catalog >> Information and Admin >> Catalog >> Manufacturers

9. Use social proof to gain user trust and keep your visitors engaged in your website

   Link to your website on all social media profiles. Social proof is for customers' confidence. The footer has options to keep the user engaged (social media, phone number, etc)

10. Internal linking is also important

    In product pages, we can do it by adding the related products

11. Page Speed: Choose your hosting server properly

    Use the right cache module to get more benefits we missed Litespeed plugins in our WordPress website by which site was slow, so better to ask your hosting server which caches are supported.
    Check with the google page speed and follow their suggestions to improve the page speed. Improving the Google PageSpeed insights score will help a lot to show in the search results.

12. For improved performance: Minify HTML, Minify CSS, and Minify JS

    - To minify the HTML you can use this free module
    HTML Minify | Compress code | SourceCode Compressor
    For CSS and JS minification use the developer's help.

13. Use srcset for images which helps properly size the images as per the screen

    Load images properly as per the screen like with srcset you can load different images for different screens. one example image code:
    
    See the code srcset="https://i1.wp.com/webocreation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/out-of-stock-admin-setting.jpg?w=800&ssl=1 800w, https://i1.wp.com/webocreation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/out-of-stock-admin-setting.jpg?resize=300%2C229&ssl=1 300w, https://i1.wp.com/webocreation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/out-of-stock-admin-setting.jpg?resize=768%2C586&ssl=1 768w, https://i1.wp.com/webocreation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/out-of-stock-admin-setting.jpg?resize=80%2C60&ssl=1 80w, https://i1.wp.com/webocreation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/out-of-stock-admin-setting.jpg?resize=696%2C531&ssl=1 696w, https://i1.wp.com/webocreation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/out-of-stock-admin-setting.jpg?resize=551%2C420&ssl=1 551w" this loads the images as per the width of the screen.
    We didn't find any module for this, we will try to provide it soon, so for now, developer help is needed.
    
    https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/oversized-images

14. Speed up the repeat visit by serving static assets with an efficient cache policy 

    You can serve static assets with an efficient cache policy by adding the following code in the .htaccess file, these are just our ideas, you can make changes as per your requirement:
    
    # Set up 1 week of caching on javascript and CSS
    
    ExpiresDefault A604800
    Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate"
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    
    
    # LBROWSERCSTART Browser Caching
    
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/javascript "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/xhtml-xml "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
    ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
    
    # END Caching LBROWSERCEND

15. GZIP for more efficient transfer to requesting clients. The compression level must be between 0 - 9.

    To enable the text compression in Opencart, go to Admin >> System >> Settings >> Server tab >> Add the "Output Compression Level". The value should be 0-9, what we find out is most of the time it works above 5 but hit and trial is the only option that we see. With these, it minimizes the byte size of network responses and fewer bytes means the page loads fast.

16. Developer or Designer tasks: Ensure text remains visible during Webfont load

    Follow the idea provided at https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/02/font-display. Just for your information, we tried that and in our case, we used font-display: swap, and only works. Something like below:
    @font-face {
    font-family: 'Arvo';
    font-display: swap;
    src: local('Arvo'), url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/arvo/v9/rC7kKhY-eUDY-ucISTIf5PesZW2xOQ-xsNqO47m55DA.woff2) format('woff2');
    }

17. Look for Critical CSS: Defer unused CSS, remove all unused CSS on a page, and try to target CSS for each page.

    https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/unused-css

18. Fix broken links

    Broken links on the website are harmful to SEO. So one freeway to check the broken link is https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
    Once it finds the broken links then fix them.

19. 301 Redirect For Opencart 3 free module

    Install this free module 301 Redirect For Opencart 3.0.x - Beta and you can redirect old URLs to new URLs, so if you have to change the SEO URL keyword then don't forget to add the 301 redirects.

20. Add your Business to Google

    Open https://business.google.com and add your business details.
    
    
    Best practices for SEO as they relate to local searches include creating a Google My Business page. This practice is especially important for brick-and-mortar businesses as it shows a rich result on local Google SERPs.

21. Add an SSL certificate to your site and redirect to the same host

    For safety, security, and customer confidence.
    All domains are to be redirected to the same host as https://yourwebsiteurl.com, choose www or non-www redirect to one, and use one.

22. Mobile-first approach and Use a responsive, mobile-friendly design

    Mobile-friendly is for mobile fitness, as Google search started to index the mobile-first, so be sure you don't hide things on a mobile phone and show them on a desktop, if it is hidden on the mobile then Google search will no see it, what we found is it checks for the content, links count to see if it is similar with a desktop view and mobile view.

23. Make AMP page for Opencart

    Consider creating and using AMP versions of your product pages for the fastest experience. Check this free module:
    AMP for Product Pages

24. Schema structured data markup for the Opencart product page

    Schema structured data markup https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data
    Testing tool: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/
    But we did not find Opencart version 3, we are working on it to provide you with version 3, here is for 1.5
    https://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=marketplace/extension/info&extension_id=6485&filter_license=0

25. Monitor website activities, get notified of downtime, set up an SEMrush account, and set up Google Analytics

    Check this blog post "Free Automated Testing and Monitoring of Opencart Functionalities and Sites" which will monitor the downtime send the notifications and monitor for any errors by automated testing.
    To add Google Analytics, Go to admin >> Extensions >> Extensions >> Choose Analytics >> Install the Google Analytics extension and edit and add the analytics tracking code.
    Setup the free Semrush account and you will get 100 pages scanned every month, we found it valuable for a free account also so added it here

26. Remove index.php?route= in OpenCart for contact, home, and other

    Go to this blog post and download the module to remove index.php?route= in Opencart 3
    https://webocreation.com/remove-route-in-opencart-for-contact-home-and-other/

27. Setup Cloudflare for Opencart

    Visit https://webocreation.com/how-to-setup-cloudflare-easily-for-ecommerce-websites-like-opencart/ to set up Cloudflare for your website. It helps with security, performance, and reliability.