Textil de Casa was launched on the market as an online store specialized in bed linen, bedding sets, Flex mattresses, duvets, Massana pajamas… and the entire world of home textiles.
On their website you will find a wide catalog including, for example, bath textiles, kitchen linens, products for children, and women’s clothing.
Recently, the online store platform was changed, moving to the popular PrestaShop e-commerce CMS. From an SEO perspective, a website migration already represents a challenge for positioning. If we add the use of PrestaShop, with its specific SEO optimization requirements, we must be especially careful not to lose the positioning work already achieved. In this sense, here’s how we optimized (and continue to optimize) SEO in PrestaShop for Textil de Casa.
How to optimize SEO in PrestaShop?
In the case of Textil de Casa, there was already a custom-made online store in place. For this reason, the SEO optimization tasks in PrestaShop focused on two main areas:
- Maintaining the previous website’s ranking
- Optimizing the SEO of the new website, taking into account PrestaShop’s specific features
For the first goal, maintaining the previous site’s positioning, we carried out a series of tasks and checks, which included:
- 301 redirects: as with any SEO migration, if the URLs of the new website change compared to the old ones, we need to redirect them to their new versions to avoid losing rankings. In PrestaShop, we can use a module to manage redirects or directly edit the .htaccess file to add them.
- Internal linking structure: with a migration that involves a CMS change, the internal linking structures of the website (menus, product listings, related product blocks, etc.) will likely change. In this case, we replicated the internal linking of the old website as much as possible and introduced improvements, either through PrestaShop’s own modules or, if the online store doesn’t have too many products, by manually editing content and adding links.
- Content migration: the main weight of an e-commerce website’s SEO usually lies in its catalog (beyond informational content, buying guides, or blog posts). With PrestaShop’s Import feature, we were able to bulk upload all the catalog content from the previous online store (products, brands, etc.).
- New Sitemap: with the migration of Textil de Casa’s website to PrestaShop, new URLs were generated. In addition to the redirects mentioned above, to help Google find and clearly identify the canonical URLs of our site, we submitted a Sitemap.xml file via Google Search Console.
On the other hand, PrestaShop itself does not always include certain SEO optimization options by default, or they need to be configured. To rank for terms such as home textiles, bed linen, Flex mattresses, duvets, Massana pajamas, or bedding sets for Textil de Casa, we carried out the following actions:
- Loading speed: under the Performance section, PrestaShop includes several options to improve website loading speed. Depending on the site, theme, modules, and other variables, we need to adjust the configuration accordingly.
- Canonical URLs: depending on the version of PrestaShop we use, it is necessary to configure which URLs will be set as “canonicals” for Google and other search engines. This is especially important if we work with products that have multiple variations or filtering systems.
- Rich Snippets and Google: some PrestaShop themes include Schema data markup for catalogs that do not fully comply with Google’s requirements. This means that, unless we correct it, the site may not be eligible to appear with Rich Snippets in Google’s search results.
- Category descriptions: many PrestaShop themes and templates do not implement category descriptions properly, leading to issues such as duplicated HTML (short and long versions), hidden text sections, or content not visible on mobile devices. To avoid this, we modified the template files and went one step further by adding another text field in the categories specifically focused on SEO.
- Management of Titles and Meta Descriptions: by default, PrestaShop does not allow bulk editing of the Title and Meta Description fields for products. This means they would need to be added one by one, which is not viable for large catalogs. To solve this, we can either use a specific module, use the Import option to bulk upload changes to these fields, or directly insert the updates into the database.
These are just some of the actions we have carried out from a technical SEO perspective in PrestaShop for Textil de Casa. SEO optimization work never ends, which is why we continue to implement improvements to help the project grow.
Store dedicated to the world of home textile