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John W.
John W.
User

New product sheet pages in version 2021.3.2  en

Author: John W.
Visited 1335, Followers 1, Shared 0  

This is a continuation of the discussion from: https://helpcenter.websitex5.com/en/post/240041

I took the plunge and had updated to the latest version. I was very curious about the individual pages that can be created per product. So I tested only 8 products. I did not dive in deep with the added "details" and the multiple tabs you can create there. It said optional, so I left that entire text entry field blank. The availablity was easy for just the green, yellow, red button. And the SEO was pretty much like the rest of the program when setting up default or custom title tags, and optional description and keywords tags. [Do note here, even though Google pays no attention to keywords, the search field you put on your website does. So keywords do help users already on your site.]

So I tested my 8 pages. Looks like they are functioning just like the blog. They are dynamic. Thus domain-name/product/?product name. And that is how the automatic canonical tag is set up too. Looks like all the products you add, will end up in an ever growing larger index.php file inside the /product/ folder. So you will not see the individual dynamic page names on your server, and they are not added to a sitemap file either. There was discussion about how to get a sitemap file to automatically create for the products. And if it rests inside the /product/ folder, even better. This way it would not interfere with the main sitemap.xml. And you can tell Google to look for multiple sitemap.xml files. They are fine with that. I have one in my /blog folder that I update manually, and Google takes a peek for it every 3 to 4 weeks on their own.

I do see that when on one of my static pages for the products, when you click on the product title (name), it does link to the new product sheet page. But it does not indicate that the words are any kind of a link unless resting the mouse pointer over them. Not sure how it will work on a phone or tablet, I have not looked yet.

I would think if I filled in the details section, which could become a bit of work, the product sheet page will be nicer with more information. The fact that the product name is a link on the static page is at least good for the robot crawlers to find the dynamic page. So that is helpful, even though it is somewhat hidden to the user. And for the most part, unnecessary. If the user already sees all the product info on my static page, why go to the dynamic to read the same thing. But when using the search bar, when the new dynamic pages are part of the search results, that can be very helpful for narrowing down one product at a time.

Now what I did not like. Ouch. Seems Google Lighthouse gives the new dynamic pages a horrible score. They are very slow to load for some reason. I would have thought the opposite. With less on the page, and just the product card for the most part, I was expecting to see a speed blast. But that is not happening. Not sure why.

So I am not sure if I am going to continue creating more of these product sheet pages. If they are going to get poor page results, I do not know how they will help, especially if they slow the website down.

And I am going to slip this in here again. PLEASE. Create a way where we can add image ALT tags to our images in the shopping cart product cards. We need to improve our SEO scores. And this is a biggie. Especially for those who use image search. PLEASE, figure out a way to add ALT tags.

Posted on the
5 ANSWERS
Aleksej H.
Aleksej H.
Moderator

Hello. I sent a notification about your question to the company employees, expect an answer from them here in the comments.

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Posted on the from Aleksej H.
John W.
John W.
User
Author

Of the 8 products I allowed to create product sheet pages, I turned them back off. Google Search Consule already issed a warning that the one URL I asked them to index came up with a missing URL error. Something in the code did not create an outbound url (???) in the html. Nonetheless, not much time to fiddle with it now, so it seemed safer to just cancel the experiement for now.

What would be nice is for X5 to create a static page for the product sheets. Get rid of the ? in the URL, make it a real permanent URL, that can be updated any time you want to change something such as a description or price. And if the product ever becomes discontinued, you can still leave the page up with a new description and even a link to the replacement product or suggestions. If you ever need to remove the page, then remove it and add a 301 redirect to the .htaccess file.

But a static URL that automatically adds itself into the sitemap.xml would be better than the dynamic url that is stuffed into the index.php file. That file could become really huge with a lot of parts and descriptions in it. It most likel will cause longer loading times. And we all know, Google hates that. And all the Google juniors aren't fond of it either.

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Posted on the from John W.
Andrzej K.
Andrzej K.
User

+100

And please add tag "alt" to all galleries - I have ask for it for about two years or more... It is about 5 minutes of programmer work - there is an alt tag, but empty.

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Posted on the from Andrzej K.
Incomedia
Stefano G.
Incomedia

Hello John

Creating a static page for each product would be extremely taxing both performance and space-wise. In fact, most systems that operate in this way all create "virtual" pages for their products. 

What I can confirm though is that the product page is currently not inserted into the Sitemap.

The developers have been informed on this so that further improvements such as this can be kept under consideration to make the indexing of these pages more efficient 

For the moment though, I don't believe there's still any news on the matter

Should there be any changes regarding this aspect of the software, it will be made known publicly

Thank you for your feedback as always

Stefano

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Posted on the from Stefano G.
John W.
John W.
User
Author

Okay, Stefano. I will be counting on you to keep pushing them. The sitemap.xml and ALT tags for the shopping cart and gallery images will be BIG Pluses for SEO.

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Posted on the from John W.