There are multiple possible reasons:

• The product had been deleted by mistake, so you had to recreate it and therefore it’s not really new
• It does not have a photo, it is an insignificant little accessory… In short it does not really have its place among the new products that you want to highlight
• On the contrary, it is an article that sells very well and you would like to be able to extend the time it will spend on this page.

Whatever the reason you face the same problem: you cannot modify this value from the back-office of your Prestashop e-store. We will see how to overcome this limitation.

Expert solution : Modify the creation date directly in the database

If you have access to the database management system (generally PhpMyAdmin) and you master these operations, you can change the date of creation directly in the database.

To do this, start by locating the id of the product you want to modify in the list present in the Catalog > Products menu. Pretty simple, it’s the number in the 1st column to the left.

Then open the database in PhpMyAdmin interface and go to the product_shop table. Click on the “Search” tab, enter the product ID and validate.

Locate the date_add column, click the cell to display the date picker, and use it to change the value.

If you use the “multishop” mode of Prestashop, searching a product from its will give you several lines. Make the change for as many as you want, using the shop_id column to identify the shop.

Then go to the product table to reproduce the same manipulation (find the product from its ID then modify the date present in the date_add column for it).

Important: if you do not have a good understanding of PhpMyAdmin, or if you do not know how to access it, we strongly advise you to turn to the 2nd method explained below. On the other hand, to avoid any unpleasant surprises, we recommend that you perform a database backup via the backup menu before performing these operations.

Easy solution : Use a module to modify the date of addition of the product

If the operations described above seem complex to you, or if you simply want to simplify your work, you can also use a module to very easily modify the product creation date in Prestashop.

Good news, we have what you need! Lucky you, it’s not expensive at all, and even free for Prestashop 1.6

The operation is very simple since the module adds a new field in the product-page of your shop’s back-offfice, as you can see on the screenshots below.

To modify the date of addition of the product you just have to click in the field to display the calendar (or “datepicker”), then choose the new date and save. It’s that simple.

This module is available on our store. Please feel free to click on the link below to access its download page. The Prestashop 1.6 version is free, while Prestashop 1.7 version is available at a very low price. In both cases the module will be very helpful.

L’article Prestashop – Change product creation date est apparu en premier sur BeComWeb Web-Agency.

However, the information displayed on this page is limited: just your logo, a title and a short text… Nothing more. A little light ! If the version 1.7 of Prestashop allows you to enter a personalized maintenance message, it is still quite limited. Basically it is like saying “We are closed” to your customers, without further details.

Which raises many questions for them:

• When will your site be available again?
• How to contact you during this time?

And on your side you might want to make this page a little nicer. Black text on a white background, no image,… This is not what we can call “attractive”.

Edit Prestashop maintenance page manually

The 1st method to modify the content and the appearance of the maintenance page will consist of modifying the files that compose it.

Let’s start with Prestashop 1.6. In this version, the files in question are those ones:

• the maintenance.tpl template (located in your theme directory),
• the maintenance.css stylesheet (located in the css subdirectory of your theme)

If you want to add texts or images, you can do so in the template. For texts, if your store is multilingual, do not forget to respect the Smarty syntax which give you the ability to make a character string translatable:{l s=’Text to be translated’}.

Then for all the design modifications (font size, background color, ..), you must modify the stylesheet (which obviously requires a little mastery of this language).

In Prestashop 1.7, the names and locations of these files are slightly different:

• the maintenance.tpl template is located in thetemplates/errors directory of your theme,
• the stylesheet is called error.css and is in theassets/css directory of your theme

Don’t forget that in this version you can customize the text of the page yourself, as I told you a little earlier (from the “Shop parameters > General” menu, “Maintenance” tabs).

A customization module for the Prestashop maintenance page

If the 1st method turns you off (because you do not have the necessary technical skills), you can have a look on our “Custom maintenance page” module.

Very easy to use, it has the following options:

• selection of a template from the available selection (“Site under maintenance”, “Available soon”) or manual entry of the page title and text,
• choice of image and background color,
• setting up a countdown before the availability of the site
• display of contact details and links to social networks

In a few minutes you will be able to offer your customers a nicer, usefull and more complete maintenance page for your Prestashop store, as in the examples below.

Do not hesitate to take a deeper look at the modul’s dedicatedpage, you will find the full list of features and several other screenshots.

L’article Prestashop – Customize the maintenance page est apparu en premier sur BeComWeb Web-Agency.

Way too light default values​​

By default, if you don’t enter any meta title, Prestashop will just use the name of your store, which is basic and therefore a bit inconsistant. You lose an opportunity to say a little more about your business.

Even worse! By default the predefined meta description of the homepage of a Prestashop site is “Shop powered by PrestaShop”. And since the meta descriptionis often (but not always) used as the snippet by Google and other search engines, it is essential to replace this text.

For those of you who are not familiar with the term, the snippet is this little piece of text that can be found under the title and the url in the search results.

So if you do not modify the meta description of your homepage, you may end up in this kind of situation where Google uses the phrase “Store powered by Prestashop” as a snippet (sometimes supplemented by some bits of text picked up on the page by the robot), as in the example below. Admit that it’s pretty bad huh ?

Optimizing the meta tags of the home page for a better SEO

As explained above, modifying the title and description of the home page will allow you to improve your natural referencing.

To customize this information you must go to Preferences > SEO & URLs menu (or Store settings > Traffic and SEOunder Prestashop 1.7).

You will then find a list of all the pages on your site (more precisely a list of all the controllers). Locate the line that corresponds index then click on the Modify button.

On the next page, you will have access to different fields: Page Title, Meta Descriptionan dMeta Keywords. You can already ignore the last one, it’s been several years since search engines do not take it into account anymore. Let’s focus on the other two.

Let’s start with the page title of the page. Be careful not to confuse it with the H1 title, they are two different things. The title of the page is this text that appears in the tab of your browser. Modifying it is also an opportunity to transmit additional information to search engines. Your slogan, a few words to designate your company,… the choice is yours. But by placing the most relevant keywords, you are likely to move up a few places in the search results. Examples ? “Anytown PC Clinical – whatever the bug is, we will fix it” or even “Super Swag Shop 3000 – best brands streetwear: Adidas, Nike, Lacoste,…”.

No example for the meta description, the possibilities are too wide. But you just need to follow this general recommendation when it comes to SEO: write text that is both intelligible to humans and relevant to bots. Obviously this text will have to contain the keywords that you will have determined as being those which fit best with your SEO strategy. Also remember that it is better to use sentences, simply listing terms or brands will always be less effective.

Improve the SEO of your Prestashop store: correct and optimize

Editing the title and meta description of the home page isn’t always enough to get your store up in search results.

Poor SEO can be due to many factors and therefore the solutions to be provided are of different natures . Depending on the case, it may be a question of corrections to be applied in the code (ex: revisions of the hierarchy of the titles of the blocks) or of the enrichment of the contents (ex: rewriting of the texts, addition of data on the images ,…).

L’article Prestashop – Edit title and description of homepage est apparu en premier sur BeComWeb Web-Agency.