How to integrate WordPress with Prestashop 1.6

The battle to position our eCommerce sites in Google SERPs is getting tougher every day. For quite some time now, many online stores have been trying to improve their stores' SEO by creating a blog. To do this, the best option available to us, due to the variety of functions that we achieve on one side (CMS online store) and the other (CMS blog) is the integration of WordPress with PrestaShop. In this post, we will try to explain the steps to follow to achieve this.

Integrate WordPress blog into PrestaShop store

Let's assume that you already have your PrestaShop 1.6 store installed and running and you want to open a blog. To do this:

WordPress Installation

1. Let's start by downloading the latest version of WordPress .
2. Once the file has been downloaded, we will open our store's FTP client and create a new directory in the root with the name of the path we want our blog to have. The most common thing is to create a folder called blog but, depending on your store, you can put magazine , magazine , press …
3. Now we open that folder, empty for now, and upload the files (unzipped) that we have downloaded from the WordPress repository.
4. After this, we are going to create a specific database for the blog. Although it is possible that it is in the same database as the store, to avoid errors it is best to create a new one. To do this, you only have to access the administration panel of your hosting and, depending on the hosting you have contracted, follow the steps to create a new database.
5. With the data from our new database, we will go to the FTP client and look for the wp-config-sample.php file in the blog folder (or whatever we have called it) to enter the credentials. Normally, we only have to fill in the name, username and password fields.
6. Finally, we will proceed with the installation for which we will go to the URL http://domain.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php and follow the steps of the WordPress installation wizard.

WordPress integration in our online store

With WordPress correctly installed, we will proceed to integrate it with our PrestaShop store. To do this, we will have to make some modifications to the files of both CMS. [fa type="tag"] To avoid problems in future updates of our theme, we recommend working with Child Themes in WordPress. Now we go to the WordPress header.php file and overwrite the content with: footer.php file. Possible problems Even if we have followed these steps, we may encounter some problems:

1. Redirection link : To fix this we must correctly enter the URL paths for both PrestaShop and WordPress. For the first case, go to Preferences -> SEO and URL in the blackoffice and enter the path of our domain (https://domain.com), and for WordPress, go to the backoffice and in Settings -> General , enter the path of the blog (https://domain.com/blog)
2. Problem with titles : It may also happen that in the titles of the entries “404 page not found” appears. To solve this we must install the Ultimate SEO plugin and then replace these lines in the PrestaSop php ,

{if isset($meta_description) AND $meta_description} {/if} {if isset($meta_keywords) AND $meta_keywords} {/if} For these others: {$dir=$smarty.server.PHP_SELF} {if strpos($dir,”/blog/”)===false} {if isset($meta_description) AND $meta_description} {/if} {if isset($meta_keywords) AND $meta_keywords} {/if} {/if}

Display WordPress posts in PrestaShop

Once we have installed our blog and integrated it with the store, we may want to show our latest posts or news from specific categories in different parts of our store. To do this, the best solution is to install the My WordPress Post module. The configuration is very simple, we will only have to enter the WordPress database accesses and select where we want to display the entries. In addition, configuring the hooks allows you a wide variety of options.

What content to write on an eCommerce blog

Once we have everything up and running, it's time to start adding content to our blog. However, we must avoid the thin content that is so common in many e-commerce blogs and meet a number of requirements.

Do not cannibalize

Target keywords that are not present in your online store. Focus on long tails and guides that make life easier for the user. Don't try to rank a blog post or category for men's shoes if you have a category in your store with the same name.

Look for search intentions that the store doesn't meet

Search Intent is becoming more and more important, so you should try to fine-tune your keyword research to direct your posts toward informative search intentions that the store's URLs cannot meet (or rather, do not rank for).

Try to be helpful

It's a very common refrain, but it keeps happening. Don't put out content just for the sake of it, it's better to have a little good content than a lot bad content. Crawling costs Google money, and if what we show them isn't quality, we're burning up our crawling budget for nothing.