PrestaShop Sitemap
Unlimited-depth category trees are perfectly normal in PrestaShop, but they are not best-practice for customer-facing navigation.
Written by Petro Mäntylä
Updated at May 26th, 2025
Sisällysluettelo
1. What the client is actually doing
Partco’s sitemap shows a single monolithic <ul> with 5-7 nested levels (e.g. Komponentit → Aktiivit → Transistorit ja Fetit → …) partco.fi
In PrestaShop every product must belong to at least one default category; breadcrumbs are rendered from that active path. Forum threads are full of users complaining that deep or multiple paths make breadcrumbs unpredictable and hard to style PrestaShopPrestaShop.
So the client is relying on the catalog tree for three different jobs:
| Job | Needs |
|---|---|
| Logical storage (“folders” in BO) | Can be arbitrarily deep |
| SEO URLs & breadcrumbs | Must be consistent, avoid duplicates |
| Storefront menu / mega-menu | Should be shallow, scannable |
Trying to satisfy all three with one tree inevitably produces friction.
2. Why 3 visible levels is the prevailing best practice
| Factor | Shallow (≤3) | Deep (4-6) |
|---|---|---|
| Findability (UX) | Categories readable in one glance; mobile tap count low | Users must drill-down multiple times; higher pogo-sticking |
| SEO / crawl budget | Fewer clicks from root ⇒ PageRank flows better; shorter, keyword-rich URLs | Long parameterised URLs; duplicate paths; may dilute authority Nielsen Norman GroupOncrawl - Technical SEO Data |
| Maintenance | Easy bulk moves; WYSIWYG when merchandisers add a product | Every new product requires choosing the exact sub-sub-sub category |
| Scalability | Extra dimensions handled by faceted search / attributes | Tree explodes in width and depth |
Multiple industry guides now explicitly call out “three is the key number” for category depth eComStrive.com.
3. Common modern pattern: Dual taxonomies
| Layer | Purpose | Authoring effort |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog tree (deep, technical) | Internal grouping, bulk pricing, ERP sync | Maintained by ops team; no design impact |
| Navigation taxonomy (flat, curated) | Main menu, breadcrumbs, canonical URL path | Merchandiser controls via a “Navigation builder” UI |
Many platforms (Shopify “Collections”, Magento “Menu builder”, modern PIMs) separate these out. PrestaShop doesn’t out-of-the-box, but you can achieve the same:
- Keep the existing deep tree for legacy data/imports.
- Mark one category per product as “canonical navigation category” (can be done with a custom field or “Default category”).
- Use a menu module (e.g. Mega Menu, Advanced Top Menu) that lets you hand-pick which nodes appear, limiting depth to three.
- Expose additional facets (brand, voltage, package, etc.) so users can still zero in quickly.
That way there is no double data-entry: merchandise folks set the canonical category once; the menu and breadcrumbs inherit it, while ops can still file products wherever they want in the back-office tree.
4. Mapping this to AI Commerce Cloud
Because your platform already assumes 3 levels, the simplest migration strategy is:
Prestashop path: Komponentit / Aktiivit / Transistorit / MOSFET / P-channel
Mapping rule: Level-1 Level-2 Level-3 -> attribute “Type” -> attribute “Polarity”
Result in ACC: Komponentit / Aktiivit / Transistorit + facets (Type=MOSFET, Polarity=P-channel)- Build a one-off category-to-facets mapping during import.
- Store the original PrestaShop category ID in a hidden field so future syncs don’t break.
- Your existing 3-level breadcrumb component will work unchanged.
5. What to tell the client
“PrestaShop lets you nest categories as deep as you need, so many long-running sites keep the historical folder structure. But current UX/SEO best practice is to expose at most three levels to the shopper and surface extra detail through filters. That’s why Shopify, Amazon, Zalando, etc. all cap the visible tree at 2-3 layers. We can preserve your internal hierarchy for admin purposes while presenting a cleaner 3-level navigation to customers, without creating duplicate work.”
6. Optional next steps
- Data audit – Run a script to count how many products live at each depth; that usually illustrates the skew.
- Navigation prototype – Use your mega-menu component to mock a 3-level menu and test on a subset of categories.
- Attribute plan – Identify which of the level-4/5 nodes should become facets (package style, connector gender, etc.).