x-cart ~ create a html catalogue of your store

One of the features that makes x-cart stand out from other shopping cart solutions is its ability to be search engine friendly. To take maximum benefit of this, you can create a html 'catalogue' verion of your store. It's a plain version of your store & the search engine spiders can run around and index this a lot better than the actual shop.

The html version looks exacty the same as your store. As soon as someone clicks on a BUY button, they get sent straight back to the 'real' store. When you update products in your store, the real version of the store is updated automatically, but the html version isn't. So each time you change products, you should come back to this tutorial and re-create your html catalogue.

1. Click on HTML Catalog in the Administration section of the menu
2. Drop the old catalogue before generating new one - if you have deleted products since your last update, tick the box. If you haven't deleted products it doesn't matter whether the box is ticked or not.
3. Category - leave as Root Categories so it will do the whole shop. If you only made changes to one category since the last HTML Catalog regeneration, choose the category where you made the changes.
4. Run through subcategories - keep the tick in the box.
5. Generate HTML pages for - Categories and Products will get you the best search engine results.
6. Number of pages per one pass - leave set to ALL. If it times out, change the setting to a number (say 50) and try again.
7. Style of catalogue file names - Set it at 'With hyphens in filenames (4.0)'
8. Convert embedded static pages - leave the tick in the box
9. Catalogue Path - should have /catalog, leave this as is.
10. Click Generate Catalog

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