URL Rewrite Regeneration Extension for Magento 2

One of the common issues any ecommerce merchant might face is the regeneration of product and category URLs. Such events like product import, product/category name changes, change in configuration, etc. require reindexing of the URLs. Even a medium-size online store might have plenty of URL rewrites. If you operate your store on the out-of-the-box Magento 2 platform, you will need to spend quite much time on rebuilding all the product URLs.

Luckily, there is a solution for the URL rewrite headache – URL Rewrite Regeneration by T.H. Lassche Webdevelopment. The Magento 2 extension drastically simplifies the process of product and category URL rewrites regeneration and helps to build an SEO friendly URL structure.

Buy Now URL Rewrite Regeneration on Magento Marketplace

URL Rewrite Regeneration for Magento 2 allows online store owners to quickly regenerate URLs for all products and categories. The tool is a necessary add-on for websites after migration and product import. Besides simplifying some routine admin tasks, the Magento 2 URL rewrite module helps with your search engine ranking, since it makes URLs SEO-friendly.

Why do you need an URL rewrite indexer?

First, we want to talk about the necessity of using URL rewrites on an ecommerce store. To better understand their benefit, let’s think how an SEO friendly URL should look.

From the SEO perspective, URLs have an influence on your website ranking, which makes it important to include keywords in your links. Since website URLs are displayed in search results, they also affect a click-through rate. From the user perspective, online shoppers view webpage links in their browser’s address bar. If a page has a poor URL structure, it creates a negative impression on your potential customers. That’s why the first thing you should think about when generating URL links is their readability for a real person.

There are some general rules to follow to generate URL links that will be both clear for customers and crawlable by search engines. These guidelines include usage of descriptive keywords, setting canonical URLs, avoiding keyword stuffing, minding an URL length, and removing unwieldy text characters. Another vital aspect of an URL design is minimizing dynamic parameters.

Without using any URL rewrite tool, your web page links might look something like this:

https://domain.com/cat/?id=1234

To improve your website visibility for web crawlers, you should try to avoid long dynamic URL strings and opt for static URLs with a clear folder structure. Besides, you can include meaningful keywords in an URL string, which will also make them more user-friendly.

That’s when the URL rewrite tools come to help. Depending on the platform where you operate our website, there is an option to use the mod_rewrite tool that works on Apache, as well as some third-party modules like URL Rewrite Regeneration. This way, you can modify your long dynamic URL into a shorter and readable static one like this:

http://domain.com/cat/your-best-product

URL rewrites with default Magento

Now, let’s see how the URL rewrite functionality is presented on the Magento 2 platform out of the box. Magento supports URL rewrites for products, categories, and CMS pages.

The Magento 2 platform is integrated with Web Server Apache Rewrites. If Apache is enabled, the index.php file will be deleted from an URL string. This way, you can improve your URL structure by removing unnecessary elements that don’t bring any value to website performance and ranking in search results. With default Magento, you can also exclude the .html element from an URL path.

If you want to know more about URL rewrite functionality in out-of-the-box Magento 2, check out this guide.

However, Magento lacks a significant feature related to regeneration of URL rewrites. Luckily, we have the URL Rewrite Regeneration module that is built to solve this issue.

How does URL Rewrite Regeneration work?

The backend interface of the URL Rewrite Regeneration extension is pretty simple. To reindex a product or category URL, you need to run a single CLI command added by the module: bin/magento thlassche:regenerate_product_urls. The extension can be run from the command line, as well as automatically using cronjob.

The plugin regenerates URL rewrites without modifying any essential product data. After installing the extension, you will be able to update all your product URLs to make them look better from the SEO optimization perspective.

For example, you have a product link looking like this:

http://domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/11111/s/21657671/category/318/.

Using numbers in an URL makes your website less crawlable for search engines. With the Magento 2 URL regeneration module, the above link will be changed to this one:

http://domain.com/fruits/banana.

It is also necessary to mention that the URL Rewrite plugin generates correct URLs for multiple storefronts and supports standard Magento SEO configuration.

To get more details on the backend functionality of the extension, check the user guide.

User Cases

To provide you with a better understanding of the advantages of the Magento 2 URL rewrite module, we looked into a real case from the Magento Stack Exchange.

One of the issues related to reindexing of URL rewrites on default Magento 2 is creating correct URL links for multiple store views. Without using an URL regeneration tool, you will have to handle every product and category URL rewrite manually. URL Rewrite Regeneration for Magento 2 allows you to quickly reindex URL rewrites for products and categories on a store view basis.

Final Words

URL Rewrite Generation for Magento 2 is a simple and ready-to-use extension for merchants who need the functionality of a rewrite indexer on their stores. The tool is capable of updating all product and category URL rewrites not requiring much of your time and effort. After running the extension, the structure of your URLs will become more SEO friendly, which is essential for a successful ecommerce business.

You can buy the Magento 2 module for only $49.95. Click the link below to purchase the tool immediately:

Buy Now URL Rewrite Regeneration on Magento Marketplace