PrestaShop 1.7 SEO: the checklist for a store that is not migrating yet

PrestaShop 1.7 has not been maintained since June 2025. The 1.7.8 branch moved to security-only fixes on 5 January 2023, when 8.0 came out, and the project had announced that this phase would end with 9.0.0, released on 10 June 2025. No new 1.7 version has been planned since. Yet a considerable share of French stores still run on it, and many run well.

If yours is one of them, the SEO question is not the one facing a 1.6 that needs modernising. The technical base of 1.7 is sound. What is almost always missing is filled-in fields and a blog. This article sorts out what the version gave you, what it left for you to do, and the order to do it in.

What 1.7 fixed

Three things that 1.6 owners still have to patch together are in place from the moment a 1.7 is installed.

The Classic theme is responsive and reasonably light. A 1.7 running this theme, or a child theme, clears Google's mobile thresholds without heavy work, which is not true of a 1.6 theme from 2015.

Friendly URLs are on by default, and the URL scheme is set under Shop Parameters, then Traffic & SEO: you can drop the numeric identifier from product and category addresses. A readable address carries no weight in rankings; it wins the click in the results and can be shared without embarrassment.

The PHP base is more recent. The official compatibility chart gives PHP 7.1 to 7.4 for 1.7.8, with 7.4 recommended. That is what lets you turn on an opcode cache and hold decent response times, where a 1.6.1 tops out at PHP 7.1.

The rest, tags, structured data, content, has nothing to do with the version. The fundamentals of the PrestaShop SEO guide apply unchanged.

What is still empty in an ordinary 1.7

Open the back office of any 1.7 store picked at random and look in four places.

The SEO tab of each product page, first: the title tag and meta description fields exist, and they are empty or filled by default with the product name. On the fifty references that make your revenue, that is a direct hole in your click-through rate. The formats and the formulas fit on one page.

The descriptions, next: a good part of the catalogue still carries the supplier's text, the same one two hundred other resellers use. The version changes nothing here: duplicate content gets fixed product by product.

The category pages: the description field is there, and it is empty. A category with no text is a list of thumbnails that Google has no reason to rank on the generic query it could otherwise target.

The blog, last: PrestaShop 1.7 does not ship one. Everything people search for before buying, how to choose, what separates two ranges, which size, has nowhere to live on the store. It is the point that weighs most on the traffic curve at twelve months, and the one most stores leave aside.

The checklist, in order of return

Ten points. The first four take a day; the next six are groundwork.

1. Full HTTPS and a single domain. Check that http, www and non-www all redirect to the same address with a 301. Shop Parameters, Traffic & SEO, then Set up URLs.
2. URLs without identifiers. On the same screen, the URL scheme for products and categories can lose its number. Do it now if the store is young; if it has years of indexed URLs, set up the redirects first.
3. A sitemap file served and declared. The official Google Sitemap module is free and sufficient; declare the file in Search Console and check coverage once a month.
4. Search Console and a Web Vitals dashboard. Without measurement, the next six points cannot be put in order.
5. Title tag and meta description on the fifty products and ten categories that matter. One keyword per page, about sixty characters for the title and 150 to 160 for the meta: Google sets no limit but truncates the title to fit the screen width.
6. An original description for those same fifty products, one that answers what the buyer wants to know rather than a cosmetic rewrite of the supplier text.
7. Two to four paragraphs of text on each top-level category, placed above or below the grid depending on the theme.
8. Product structured data you have verified rather than assumed. 1.7 themes vary on this point: run three product pages through Google's rich results test, and add a module if price, availability or reviews are missing. The detail of the markup is here.
9. Performance: Smarty cache in production mode, CSS and JavaScript files combined and compressed, images resized to their display size. The Core Web Vitals of a 1.7 can almost always be fixed without touching the theme.
10. A blog, and a rhythm. There is a free blog module that installs on 1.7 as it does on 8 and 9, with categories, RSS feed, sitemap entry and BlogPosting structured data. Two articles a month for a year beat ten in the first month.

Point 10 is the one that changes the trajectory: the first nine make up for lost ground, and the tenth is the only one that pushes the curve upward over time.

What 8 or 9 would change

Little, as far as search is concerned. No version of PrestaShop brings a ranking factor in itself. 8 and 9 bring a more recent PHP, so faster execution, and 9 offers the Hummingbird theme, without making it the default. On a store whose 1.7 theme is already clean, the gain is measured in tenths of a second.

What 8 and 9 really bring is maintenance. PHP 7.4, the ceiling for 1.7.8, has not been maintained since 28 November 2022. The 1.7 core has received no security fix since June 2025. A store taking payments on a stack nobody patches any more has a problem, and it has nothing to do with rankings.

Migrate the day security or the module ecosystem demands it, and keep Google out of the decision. When you do migrate, the switch itself is what puts your rankings at risk, whatever the destination version: the redirects checklist is the document to prepare before touching anything.

The module and the app, on a 1.7

The Publium module installs on a 1.7 like any other module, a zip uploaded from the module manager, and nothing needs adapting, in the theme or in the URLs. The blog is in place when the installation finishes, with its categories, its feed and its tags. It has no price: it comes with the plan, and it stays in the store if you cancel.

The app, on subscription, covers points 5, 6, 7 and 10 of the list: it reads the catalogue, suggests queries, writes the tags, descriptions and articles, and sends them back into the store as drafts or on the date you choose. Points 1 to 4, 8 and 9 remain back-office or hosting settings, and no content tool will do them for you. The compatibility page sets out what is tested on 1.7, minor version by minor version.

A well-filled 1.7 holds its own against an empty 9. The day you migrate, the content will follow in the database, and the work of the ten points above will not need doing again.