Technical SEO Consultant, France

Accents, slugs and URL encoding on French sites

French words carry accents, cedillas and ligatures, and every CMS treats them a little differently in URLs. One template may turn équipements de sécurité into a plain slug such as equipements-de-securite, another may keep the accented letters, which then appear percent-encoded when the link is copied, and a third may drop the accented letter entirely. Over time a site can end up with all three styles plus uppercase variants, so one page is reachable at several addresses.

Search engines can handle accented URLs, so the problem is inconsistency rather than the characters themselves. The review checks:

• Which slug styles exist across templates and whether duplicates resolve to one canonical URL.
• Whether old variants redirect permanently to the chosen form rather than returning an error or a second copy.
• How internal links, sitemaps, hreflang and product feeds write the same URL, since one encoded and one decoded version can look like two pages.
• Whether apostrophes and elisions, as in l'entreprise, produce clean hyphenated slugs.

The simplest rule is plain-letter slugs, lowercase, with hyphens, generated from the title and editable by authors. Changing existing URLs is a migration in miniature, so I only recommend it where the gain justifies a redirect map. Questions about fr-FR versus other French-speaking versions belong to my international SEO work for France.

PrestaShop, Shopify and custom builds: crawl issues by platform

The French ecommerce landscape is varied. PrestaShop, which began in France, is one platform you will meet; others run on Shopify, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud or a custom build linked to an ERP. Each brings recognizable technical patterns:

• PrestaShop: modules that add their own URLs, layered navigation that creates parameter combinations, products reachable through several category paths and old URL formats kept after upgrades.
• Shopify: collection-based product paths, tag pages, limited control over robots rules and apps that inject scripts or duplicate markup.
• Adobe Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud: large catalogs, store views per language or country, and JavaScript-heavy storefronts where rendering needs checking. My JavaScript SEO page explains that comparison.
• ERP-linked custom builds: product pages that reflect whatever the ERP exports, including internal codes in titles, missing descriptions and discontinued items that leave error pages.

I do not recommend platforms on SEO grounds alone and take no fees from any of them. The review records each issue against the template, module or feed responsible, with a fix your agency can apply within the platform's constraints. If the catalog data itself is the problem, my system integration work in France looks at the link between ERP and shop.

Faceted navigation on large French catalogs

French retailers and B2B distributors often sell deep ranges: building supplies, fashion, cosmetics, spare parts, wine, office equipment. Their category pages carry filters for brand, size, color, material, price and availability, and each filter combination can become a URL. Left unmanaged, crawlers spend their time on combinations nobody searches for, while new products and important categories are visited less often.

I build the filter rules with the merchandising team, because they know which combinations match real demand:

• Combinations with search demand, such as a category plus a brand or a key attribute, become indexable landing pages with their own titles, short introductions and self-referencing canonicals.
• Useful but low-demand combinations remain available to visitors without being indexed.
• Sort orders, view modes, price sliders and multi-select combinations are kept out of crawlable links entirely.
• Pagination keeps products discoverable without generating near-empty pages.

Server logs then confirm whether crawler activity has shifted toward products and priority categories. The ecommerce SEO page covers category strategy beyond the technical layer, and the retail industry page describes the systems that sit behind a retail operation.

CNIL-aware consent, tag weight and page speed

CNIL guidance on cookies shapes how French sites present consent, including the expectation that refusing should be as easy as accepting, so consent platforms are a fixture on French commercial sites. From a performance angle, the banner and the tags behind it deserve the same scrutiny as images or code. A banner that loads late can shift the layout, a platform that blocks rendering delays the main content, and once a visitor accepts, analytics, advertising pixels, affiliate trackers, chat and review widgets may all start at once.

Core Web Vitals field data by template shows the effect on real visitors in France, many of whom browse on phones. The review then covers:

• How the consent platform is loaded and whether its banner reserves space.
• A tag inventory with an owner, purpose and loading rule for each script.
• Tags that fire site-wide but are needed on only a few pages.
• Images, fonts and caching on the slowest templates, plus where the site is hosted and how a CDN serves visitors in France.

What the banner must say, and whether any tag may run before consent, are decisions for your data protection officer or legal advisor; I look at speed and measurement. The diagnostic method is detailed on my Core Web Vitals consulting page.

Redesigns, log files and briefing your agency

A refonte, as French teams call a site redesign, is where visibility is easily lost: new templates drop text, URL patterns change, filters behave differently and redirects are left until the final days. The same applies to replatforming from PrestaShop to Shopify or Adobe Commerce, merging brand sites, or moving a .fr domain into a group .com with a /fr/ folder. My SEO migration process starts with a benchmark of what earns traffic and inquiries today, then builds and tests the redirect map, checks staging template by template and verifies production on launch day.

Log files support both audits and migrations. They show which URLs crawlers request, how often and with what response, revealing crawl waste on filters, redirect chains and old URLs still requested long after a move. I specify what to export from your host or CDN and analyze it under your data processing arrangements.

French sites are commonly built and maintained by an agency or an in-house team. I work alongside them in English, with tickets that state the evidence, the fix and the acceptance test; any French-language text changes are checked by native speakers on your side. All work is remote, with calls during French business hours. The technical SEO service describes the general method, and the France overview lists related services.