Store sitemap cut from 3,770 URLs to 951 products

MILAshop is a WooCommerce store selling handmade teepees, play mats, bedding and baby goods, made in Lithuania and shipped across the European Union, in Lithuanian and English. Its sitemap, the list a site hands to Google that says here are all my pages, had 3,770 addresses. The store has 951 products. The difference was product variants, filter combinations and technical URLs that have no value of their own. On top of that, some pages had no canonical tag, so several URLs with the same content looked like separate pages. Some pages had several main headings, so it wasn't clear what the page was about. And the Lithuanian and English versions weren't linked to each other. None of this breaks a purchase, which is exactly why it is so easy to leave alone.

• The sitemap now lists real products only. Variant, filter and technical URLs came out, so what Google is asked to visit matches what you can actually buy.
• A canonical tag on every page. The same product can be reached through a category, a filter or a search, and the tag tells Google which address is the main one. Google's own reasons for doing this include avoiding crawling time spent on duplicate pages.
• One main heading (H1) per page, matching what the page is actually about. The theme had been producing several.
• The Lithuanian and English versions linked with hreflang tags in both directions, so search engines treat them as translations of the same page, not as duplicates. Google requires each language version to list itself and all the others.
• Some of these changes live on the server, inside the store itself. That kind of work is unforgiving: one unguarded condition can take the whole site down, and it happened once. Since then every change there gets its own safeguard and is checked on the live site right after upload.

The sitemap is public at milashop.eu/wp-sitemap.xml. The store generates that list itself, so you can look at it without taking our word for anything. You can run the same check on your own site in a minute: add /wp-sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml to your domain and compare the count with how many products or pages you really have. If it is several times bigger, you have the same problem.

The store stays on a monthly care plan. An online store is the one kind of site you really can't leave unattended: payment and security updates keep coming, and an outdated payment module is a money problem, not a looks problem. The expected effect of the cleanup is that Google spends its visits on products instead of near-copies, so new products get picked up sooner. That is how it should work, not something we measured, and we say so.

We don't publish traffic or ranking numbers before and after. We don't have the data to back them up, and the effect of technical cleanup on search doesn't show up within weeks. Publishing a percentage we couldn't produce on request would be making it up.