If you accept credit cards on your Zen Cart website you are required to be PCI compliant. That is just a fact. Given the shortsightedness of the PCI scanning companies and the speed at which the technology must develop, there will always be scan fails.

I wrote about a PCI fail recently where the Zen Cart contact form was failing PCI scans for not being protected under SSL. Now, the action is under SSL and it’s certainly NOT sensitive information, but there is no convincing the scanning companies.

The simplest solution is to set your whole website to use only SSL. It’s a nice caveat that this also helps build shopper trust and make more money! Even Facebook is SSL by default now, so people are becoming more aware of SSL pages. While certainly the general public doesn’t understand the whole thing… they think and have been lead to believe that site’s need SSL to be safe.

Once you have set your entire site to SSL by changing both of your configure files to https links you will find the next snag, no more rel=”canonical” tags. Zen Cart’s canonical pages tags are awesome! They help you with SEO, reducing duplicate content and many other great perks. If only your SSL shop had them??

Switching to full SSL will turn off your rel=”canonical” tags in all of your pages. While this may be a bit short sighted on the part of the Zen Cart Development Team… it’s easily fixed! Once you make the switches to all SSL pages you will eliminate SSL/Non-SSL content duplication completely and fixing your canonical tag is necessary for a smooth transition in the search engines indexes.

How to Turn  ON Canonical Tags for SSL Pages

Open includes/init_includes/init_canonical.php

Find:

/**
* SSL Pages get no special treatment, since they’re not normally indexed
*/
case ($request_type == ‘SSL’):
$canonicalLink = ”;
break;

Change it to:

/**
* SSL Pages get no special treatment, since they’re not normally indexed
*/
// case ($request_type == ‘SSL’):
// $canonicalLink = ”;
//break;

Bravo, now your full SSL Zen Cart Shop has the brilliant rel=”canonical” tag!

** Important note: DO NOT do this unless you are running a FULL SSL catalog. Doing so will result in canonical tags on both SSL and NON-SSL pages, thus duplicate content.