SEO Suite Pro

SEO Suite Pro does the five SEO jobs an OpenCart 4 store needs and does not have: it generates URL keywords and meta text across a catalogue, emits the structured data and social markup that make a link unfurl and a search result show a price, describes catalogue images for screen readers, publishes an XML sitemap and manages robots.txt, and redirects the URLs a catalogue change leaves behind.

One archive, one Install button, five screens you turn on independently. The store that only wants a sitemap is not made to shop for one, and the store that wants all five is not made to install five things.

Who it is for

• Store owners with a catalogue reachable only at index.php?route=product/product&product_id=42, who want readable URLs across thousands of products without typing them.
• Anyone whose product links unfurl in Slack, Facebook or X as the shop's name and no picture. OpenCart 3.x emitted some of this markup; 4.x emits none of it.
• Stores that have reorganised a catalogue and do not know which inbound links they broke, or that are migrating from another platform with links to bring over.
• Stores that care that every image on the storefront is announced to a screen reader as the product's name, over and over, because that is what core's own template hardcodes.
• Anyone maintaining robots.txt over FTP who would rather do it from the admin, without an extension trampling what is already in that file.

The five areas

URLs & meta generates URL keywords for products, categories and manufacturers, and meta titles and descriptions for products and categories, from a template per type per output. You preview each template against a real entity before anything is written. It also keeps paginated, sorted and filtered listing pages canonical.

Markup emits Open Graph and Twitter Card tags so a pasted link unfurls as the thing it points at, and the JSON-LD that lets a search result show a price, an availability, a star rating and a breadcrumb trail. Every value is read from what the page already computed, so the markup and the page cannot disagree about what a shopper would pay.

Alt text describes every image of a product in its own words, per language, reaching both the product page and every product card in the store. You write one pattern and generate across the catalogue, then write the photographs that matter by hand, on OpenCart's own product form, under the picture.

Redirects records every request for a URL your store cannot resolve, with a hit count and where it was linked from, and lets you give any of them somewhere to go. It can also capture the slug renames you make in the admin, and import a migration's worth of rules from a spreadsheet.

XML sitemap publishes a sitemap of everything each of your shops displays, splitting it across files when a catalogue outgrows what a crawler accepts, and manages your crawl rules from the admin.

What it does not do

The full list is on limits and guarantees, which is short and worth reading before you buy. The boundaries most likely to matter:

• It does not audit your store or advise you. It generates, publishes and redirects. It does not score your pages, does not tell you what to write, and makes no claim about what any search engine will do with what it publishes.
• It cannot give manufacturers meta titles or descriptions. OpenCart has no column for them in any 4.x release, so a brand page gets a URL keyword and nothing else.
• Its markup covers five page types. Products, categories, brand pages, information pages and the home page. Search results, account pages and the checkout carry nothing.
• A theme whose image markup it cannot read gets no alt text, and a theme with no </head> gets no markup. In both cases it emits nothing and says so, rather than rewriting something it does not understand.
• Scheduled regeneration needs your host to be running OpenCart's cron. On OpenCart 4.1.0.4 the store's own scheduler is broken inside OpenCart itself, and what you get instead is a command line. There is deliberately no web address to paste (why).
• Redirects only records broken URLs while OpenCart's own SEO URLs are on. Serving a redirect works either way.
• The screens are English. The suite's only shopper-facing string is the shipped pattern image descriptions start from, and you replace that with your own words per language. See the language promise.
• There is one destructive button, Regenerate everything on the URLs & meta screen, behind a confirmation, with no undo. Everything else either writes where there is nothing or writes nothing at all.

What it leaves behind

What SEO Suite Pro writes into your catalogue (URL keywords, meta text, image descriptions) is yours and stays after an uninstall. So do your redirect rules, your page overrides and your crawl rules. A URL keyword is an address somebody has linked to and a meta description is copy somebody approved; neither should disappear because a module came off.

The sitemaps are the exception, and go: they are documents nobody could regenerate once the extension is gone, listing URLs that go out of date from the day they are left behind.

The rest of this section

• Requirements & install: what the store needs, the permissions to tick, and what it puts in your database and web root.
• Quick start: the shortest path from installed to useful.
• Guides: one per area, written for the job rather than the screen.
• Reference: the lists: settings, what it holds about a person, the security verdict, what it costs a page.
• Limits & guarantees: exactly what SEO Suite Pro promises, and where that promise stops.
• Troubleshooting: when it does not behave.
• Changelog: what changed in each release.

Whichever extension you bought, the shared pages apply to it too.