Block eCommerce Assets via robots.txt

This plugin adds lines to the virtual robots.txt file that WordPress creates automagically if the file is not present physically on the server to block some WooCommerce assets and Search pages that should not be indexed.

Please be aware of what this plugin does exactly: If you activate the plugin it will add some lines to the robots.txt file to tell search engine bots to not to crawl and index parts of this website.

This plugin blocks certain pages from WooCommerce (“add-to-cart”, “orderby”, “filter”, cart, account, checkout, …) from being crawled by search engines. Crawling these links normally requires a lot of CPU, memory and bandwidth because they are not cacheable and/or create crawling loops (while they are useless). Optimizing your robots.txt when running a WooCommerce online store allocates more processing power for pages that really matter.

This plugin also blocks the search pages from WordPress from getting indexed.

Please only activate this plugin if you know what you’re doing.

What can I do with this plugin?

This plugin adds the necessary lines to the virtual robots.txt file that WordPress creates automagically to block to block WooCommerce assets that should not be indexed and the Search pages.

What ideas is this plugin based on?

None. We needed a fast solution to add these lines to the robots.txt file and this was the solution we coded.

What is the robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file is a plain text file located at the root folder of a domain (or subdomain) which tells web crawlers (like Googlebot) what parts of the website they should access and index.

The first thing a search engine crawler looks at when it is visiting a page is the robots.txt file and it controls how search engine spiders see and interact with the web pages.

System requirements

PHP version 7.1 or greater.
We require 7.1 or higher because we believe that everybody should be running a modern PHP version. When releasing this plugin WordPress recommends PHP 7.4 or higher.

How to get this plugin in your Language!

The first release is avaliable in English and Spanish. In the “languages” folder we have included the necessary files to translate this plugin.

If you would like the plugin in your language and you’re good at translating, please use the native WordPress Translation functionality.

New to Translating a plugin? First read through the Translator Handbook, then select your locale at Translating WordPress and finally go to the translation page for this plugin to translate it.

Further Reading

You can access the description of the plugin in Spanish at: Block WooCommerce Assets via robots.txt en español.

Contact

For further information please send us an email.