WooCommerce Permalinks for Products & Categories

by | Nov 9, 2021 | WooCommerce

What is a permalink?

As the name suggests, we called permalink a permanent link even if you update the content on the page. It includes a domain name plus a slug, a piece of URL comes after the domain name. The goal of your permalink is to create an easy-to-understand URL structure for the understanding of both humans and search engines.

How permalinks affect SEO

Users and search engines see Permalinks when navigating through your website. It is like having your physical address. It affects how your website is going to crawl and index in search engines. The more URLs crawled and indexed in search engines depends on how well your URL structure is. So, optimising your website URL will help you to improve the crawling and indexing of your website and alternatively, it will drive more traffic to the website.

WooCommerce Permalinks

A popular thought is to always keep URL structure as simple as possible and remove any unnecessary parts of it. This is why WordPress has a permalinks feature.

If you run your store in WooCommerce, you will also have permalinks for your product and category pages.

You can access them by navigating to Settings > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard:

Best Practices of WooCommerce Permalinks

For SEO purposes, it is recommended to keep the URLs short and simple. Your product URL may contain parameters so it should contain necessary information instead of irrelevant parameters. To boost ranking, one should consider implementing relevant search keywords in the permalinks.

Below are some areas of considerations while optimising the permalinks of your website.

  • Keep it short and simple

Google is recommending keeping URLs short & simple. URL that contains obscure text or unnecessary characters or if it is longer then it is considered as non-SEO-friendly URLs. Therefore, clear URL structure encourages more clicks to your website.

Here is an example of Improper URL:

https://example.com/?p=123

Here is an example of Proper URL:

https://example.com/wordpress-permalinks/

  • Use relevant keywords

Let’s make sure that each product page contains an important keyword in the permalink. Also, you need to make sure while editing the category page and tag that it includes relevant keywords.

To edit a product page slug, go to Products > All Products and locate the item you want to edit. Then click on the Quick Edit option:

Also, you can edit the slug by navigating to the product page and open in the editor. You will then find the option to edit the slut as shown in below screenshot
woocommerce-product-quick-edit-option

Do not use any search term multiple times or in multiple product page slug. It will consider as keyword stuffing that may result in a Google penalty.

  • Be clear and descriptive

Let’s go to Products > Categories and select a category to edit from the list

On the next screen as show below, you can edit the category slug to make it more user-friendly.

woocommerce-products-slug-edit

Setup Permalinks for WooCommerce

To set up your store with Custom Permalinks for WooCommerce:
Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Permalinks.

The URL bases like /shop/, /product-category/ and /product/ can be considered unnecessary as Google knows how to define shop and product pages without the need of specifying that inside the URL. So, /product-category/ and /product/ from WooCommerce permalinks can be removed to get more SEO friendly URLs.

If you are planning to migrate your existing website to WooCommerce, our WooCommerce expert will guide you through all the important WooCommerce features necessary for the development of your eCommerce store.

Or, you can select your online store layout, and using our Free Online All-In-One Website Quotation Tool choose the customisation you require and get an immediate no-obligation quotation.