Close your x-cart without tanking SEO ranking

There are many reasons you may want to close your x-cart store - perhaps your going on holiday and order processing isn't available or making changes to your x-cart - whatever the reason, closing the shop using x-cart's default setting can cause your search engine rankings to spiral into non-existence.

Using the "Check this to close your shop temporarily:" in your x-cart admin -> general settings section will not allow customers to access your site effectively closing it, however this also prevents search engines from accessing your site pages and tells search engines that all pages have been directed to shop_closed.html. This can have a drastic consequence on search engine rankings.

Instead you can prevent orders from being processed and place a shop closed message on your stores pages as follows:

1. Open your skin1/customer/home.tpl.
   
   FIND:
   
   {include file="customer/home_main.tpl"}
   
   BEFORE:
   
   Add html code providing a formatted message about the reason your store is closed.
   
   
2. Backup your cart.php file by renaming it to cart-backup.php
   
   Create a new cart.php with an html page providing a detailed message about the store closure.
   
   
3. Your store will now remain spiderable but nobody can place orders. To restore checkout remove the message from home.tpl, delete cart.php and then rename cart-backup.php back to cart.php.