Defining a URL pattern

The URLs generated by Shopware will be created according to a template that can be defined in the administration. E.g. In the settings -> SEO area.

A good template for products can look like this:

p/{{ product.translated.name|lower }}

But, this may create occasional conflicts with duplicated product titles, which may then result in URLs not being generated for the affected products. E.g:

/detail/[product-id]

It is possible to solve this problem, but ideally Shopware ought to just add something to the end of the URL. E.g. "-1" or even just "-[product-number] in those cases. It doesn’t currently do that, so instead you get bugged URLs.

Unfortunately, we can not simply correct the URLs manually, because Shopware will not allow that. The SEO URL section is deactivated / grayed out, showing the message:

There are no SEO URLs yet.
Main category

I am not even sure what the "Main category" piece of text is supposed to mean in this context.

What can be done to solve this problem?

Since Shopware uses Slugify to generate the URLs, we can just create a decorator for Slugify, and add a custom rule for how to handle these specific situations. E.g. "+" in the title of products.

URLs should be lowercase

Because a specific URL in lowercase is not the same when written in uppercase, ideally caps should be banned in URLs. In other words, uppercase URLs could refer to entirely different resources than their lowercase counterparts.

Unfortunately you can not simply setup a redirect from uppercase to lowercase, because that will also affect Shopware's API endpoints, so you will have to make the redirect only apply to categories and products somehow.

In the SEO URL templates section, you can use the "lower" filter to convert your URLs to lowercase automatically. E.g:

For products:

p/{{ product.translated.name|lower }}

This is an ideal format for products. Do not include the category in the URL, because it is redundant, and it does not add SEO value.

For categories:

c/{% for part in category.seoBreadcrumb %}{{ part|lower }}/{% endfor %}

For blog posts:

blog/{{ blogpost.translated.slug|lower }}

Remember to setup a 301 redirect from the uppercase version to the lowercase version. In PHP, from a plugin, this can be done with a simple preg_match.

SEO URLs is a misnomer

The fact that URLs are named "SEO URLs" is also a misnomer; URLs has very little to do with SEO; they are first and foremost a way to identify a resource. Calling them "SEO URLs" may also have the unfortunate side-effect that people might erroneously think of their URLs as a matter of SEO, when we should think more in terms of usability.

Product numbers in URLs

By default it seems Shopware is including the product number in the URL, which just looks horrendous, and seems to be a lazy solution to a problem with duplicated product titles.

In addition to this, it also seems like Shopware is ignoring characters that are valid in the path part, that is, they are simply removed rather than substituted. E.g. "+" is removed, and a "plus" version of a product erroneously result in a duplicated URL, and the URL for one of the products will not be generated.

Of course, there are very little, if any, SEO impact from having the product number in the URL – not having it just looks more polished.

The /p/ part is also bad, because it is basically redundant. However, it makes sense because we have other pages on the domain which are not "products". The "p" obviously stand for "product", and does not necessarily need translation.

Remember, each URL can be different depending on the translation and the sales channel.

URLs on company pages

Another annoying thing with Shopware is that you have to create a category if you want to create a basic "page", and those URLs might end up looking like this:

/c/about-us
/c/contact
/c/privacy

You have to manually change them after creating the pages, because Shopware will think that they are categories. Technically speaking, they are, but their actual function is different from a category.

Forward slashes

Forward slashes is another issue that many content managemen systems get wrong, including Shopware.

The bad thing about carelessly using forward slashes is that they are also used to indicate a category or directory on the web server.

Of course most users don't care about URL design, but that does not mean we should ignore it, as developers. So called trailing slashes should be banned for this reason – you are on a product page, not a directory page. Having a trailing slash is also redundant, and it adds ambiguity as to what is meant. Please think about your URL design!

If you do use trailing slash, it does have one benefit however – that is, if your URL ends with a dot .. E.g. /p/some-product-name.; If someone shares this URL by e-mail or in a messenger client, the client can not tell the difference between a dot in a sentence and a dot in a URL that someone copy paste into a message, and typically they will just strip away the dot, which then causes the URL to "break", and when a user clicks it, they will get a 404 – a slash at the end will fix that problem.

Read: Using Dots in URLs

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