Go-live checklist

The Store setup panel on the Solidshop dashboard tracks the first part of this list automatically — store details, a published product, tax, shipping, an enabled and configured payment method, the storefront menu items and cart module, the order-email task, sitemap and /llms.txt discoverability, a first order and payment methods out of test mode — and links to the screen that completes each one. The sample data on a fresh install — a US shipping table and an Illinois sales tax — already satisfies the shipping and tax steps, so check those two against your own markets even when they show as done. Before opening your store to real customers, run through the full checklist, including the items only you can judge:

  • Store created with correct business name, address, currency, and timezone
  • At least one product published with images, price, and inventory
  • Product categories created and assigned
  • Tax classes, zones, and rates configured for your target markets
  • Shipping profile created with zones, regions, and rates (or all products are non-shippable)
  • At least one payment method enabled and configured with live credentials
  • Test order completed end-to-end: add to cart → checkout → payment → order confirmation
  • Order confirmation email received after test order
  • Invoice generated correctly (check the Orders view)
  • Email queue task enabled in System → Scheduled Tasks
  • Guest checkout enabled or disabled per your preference
  • Menu items created for Shop, Cart, Checkout, and Account pages
  • Cart module placed in the header or sidebar of your template
  • Product listing page has the Filters module in the sidebar (if desired)
  • SEO: product meta descriptions filled in, Joomla SEF URLs enabled
  • XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and referenced from robots.txt (see below)
  • /llms.txt responds, and robots.txt lets AI crawlers reach the site and the catalog API (see below)
  • Payment plugins switched from test mode to live mode

Submit your XML sitemap

Solidshop serves an XML sitemap of your whole site out of the box (enabled by default under Options → Sitemap): your product and category pages, plus — through the bundled Solidshop - Site Content Sitemap plugin — your menu items, articles and article categories. You don't need a separate sitemap extension. The sitemap index lives at: 

https://your-shop.example/index.php?option=com_solidshop&view=sitemap&format=xml

Prefer the shorter https://your-shop.example/sitemap.xml? Switch on Serve at /sitemap.xml under Options → Sitemap. Decide before you submit: a sitemap URL you have given Search Console has to keep working. Leave it off if another extension already serves /sitemap.xml, and note that a real sitemap.xml file in your site root always wins over it. The index.php URL keeps working either way. On a multilingual site that puts a language code in every URL, /sitemap.xml answers with a redirect to the sitemap first — search engines follow it.

Two steps make search engines pick it up — do both:

  1. Google Search Console — open Sitemaps, paste your sitemap URL, and submit. Search Console then reports indexing coverage per submitted sitemap ("500 submitted, 340 indexed"), which is a diagnostic you cannot get any other way.
  2. robots.txt — Joomla ships a static robots.txt that Solidshop cannot edit for you. Add this line so Bing and every other crawler discover the sitemap too: 
    Sitemap: https://your-shop.example/index.php?option=com_solidshop&view=sitemap&format=xml
    (or Sitemap: https://your-shop.example/sitemap.xml if you switched that on).

What the sitemap lists

  • Products and product categories a guest can see, each with its real lastmod, the primary product image, and language alternates on a multilingual shop.
  • Menu items that open a page — your home page, Contact page, blog, Products listing. Links, aliases, separators and headings are skipped, and so are pages nobody should land on from a search: sign-in and registration, search results, the cart, checkout, account, wishlist and order tracking.
  • Articles that are published, public and inside their publishing dates, at the URL your site links to. Their lastmod is the later of the last edit and the moment they went live.
  • Article categories that have at least one visible article in them or below them.

Anything set to noindex — on the article or category itself, or on the menu item that leads to it — is left out, and translations are linked to each other through Joomla's associations. Articles and categories that no menu item leads to are left out too: Joomla builds their URLs from whichever page links to them, so there is no single URL to submit. Give their category a menu item (a menu that isn't shown anywhere will do) and they appear. To choose menus, exclude menu items or categories, or drop articles and categories altogether, open System → Plugins → Solidshop - Site Content Sitemap. Already running OSMap or another sitemap extension for your articles? Disable that plugin; listing a page in two sitemaps does no harm, but one is tidier.

Running multiple stores? Each store also has its own scoped sitemap (&store_id={id}, shown on the store's SEO tab) — submit those alongside the site sitemap to get per-store indexing coverage in Search Console. A store's sitemap lists that store's catalogue only; articles and menu items belong to the site, so they are in the site-wide sitemap. Like all sitemaps these URLs are public; if you'd rather not expose which products belong to which store, switch Per-store sitemaps off under Options → Sitemap.

A sitemap is a discovery hint, not a ranking signal — it does not guarantee indexing. It pays off most for large catalogues, new domains with few inbound links, and deep pages a crawler would only reach after several clicks. Entries carry a real lastmod, so search engines learn about price and content changes without waiting to recrawl. The System → Overview page in the Solidshop admin shows the exact sitemap URL for your site and what it includes, and warns when robots.txt does not reference it yet, when a sitemap.xml file is in the way, or when Global Configuration still tells search engines not to index the site.

Be discoverable to AI agents

Solidshop serves an llms.txt file at the root of your domain — the path AI assistants and shopping agents check to learn what a site offers. It points them at the catalog API and MCP endpoint, the sitemap, your categories and policies (what it contains). Check that it responds: 

https://your-shop.example/llms.txt

Then make sure robots.txt is not undoing it. Two things to check — System → Overview shows both:

  1. The catalog API is reachable. Joomla’s stock robots.txt ships Disallow: /api/, which keeps every crawler that honours it away from the very routes llms.txt advertises. Add this line to reopen just the Solidshop routes — it is longer than the Disallow, so under the longest-match rule crawlers apply it wins: 
    Allow: /api/index.php/v1/solidshop/
  2. AI crawlers are not blocked. Many sites reflexively added Disallow rules for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot in 2023–24 and quietly cut themselves out of AI answers. Remove those rules if you want the store to be found. (Google-Extended is different: it controls Gemini grounding, not Google’s AI Overviews, which use the ordinary index.)

The two fields on the store’s SEO tab — a one-line summary and free-text notes for agents — are worth a minute: they are the only part of the file you write yourself.

Next steps

Your store is live. Here are some areas to explore next: