OpenCart | Canonical URLs

We recently decided to setup an OpenCart store for one of our clients. This comes after years of using CubeCart as an off-the-shelf shopping cart solution for various other clients. For various reasons that I won’t go into here, we decided to go with OpenCart instead.

One of the things I like to do with any site is to make sure we are using Canonical URLs.
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here is a quick description:

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages . *

For example, I like my URL to be in the format ‘www.example.com’ rather than ‘example.com so I use Apache’s MOD REWRITE function to make it change automatically when someone types in the URL without the ‘www’.
This can be helpful for Search Engine Optimisation amongst other reasons. More info at the end of the post. Continue reading »