Go-live checklist

Before opening your store to real customers, run through this checklist:

  • 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)
  • Payment plugins switched from test mode to live mode

Submit your XML sitemap

Solidshop serves an XML sitemap of your product and category pages out of the box (enabled by default under Options → Sitemap). The sitemap index lives at: 

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

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

  1. Google Search Console — open Sitemaps, paste the URL above, 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

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. 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 product pages a crawler would only reach after several clicks. Product entries carry a real per-product lastmod, so search engines learn about price and description changes without waiting to recrawl. The System → Overview page in the Solidshop admin shows the exact sitemap URL for your site and warns when robots.txt does not reference it yet.