Fast Google Sitemap

Google Sitemap Fast generates an XML sitemap for OpenCart and provides a ready-to-use URL for Google Search Console or robots.txt. The sitemap includes available products, active categories, manufacturer pages, and published articles.

What pages will the search robot see?

• Products available for purchase in the current store.
• Categories with full path, including nested sections.
• Manufacturer pages and informational articles can be included separately.
• The main page is added optionally.

For products and categories, the last modification date is transmitted. The search engine sees which pages have been updated since the last crawl and can more accurately plan re-crawls.

Setting frequency and priority

In the OpenCart panel, you can set the refresh frequency and priority for each page type, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. For example, you can assign weekly refresh rates to products, monthly refresh rates to categories, and daily refresh rates to the homepage.

Frequency and priority values serve as hints for search engines and do not guarantee a given crawl schedule.

The map is compiled with a specific store in mind. When investigating the causes of slow generation, you can enable execution time logging in the OpenCart log.

The store where the testing was conducted:

• products: 37,000
  
• categories: 320
  
• manufacturers: 840

Correct setting:

After installing and enabling the sitemap, as recommended by search engines, you need to add a link to it in the robots.txt file.

To do this, replace the code in the .htaccess file

feed/google_sitemap

on

 feed/google_sitemap_fast

For OpenCart 2.3 and above it should look like this:

 RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml$ index.php?route=extension/feed/google_sitemap_fast [L]

and in the robots.txt file itself, write the directive

 Sitemap: http://site.com/sitemap.xml

where http://site.com is your website's domain