EE-commerce Index
Technical guidance

Understand your
storefront signals.

A plain-language guide to the public homepage checks shown on E-commerce Index profiles—and what store owners can do about them.

Applies to technical methodology v0.1 · Updated 15 July 2026
These are homepage observations—not an audit.

A “No” means the signal was not detected in the public HTML we received at that time. It may exist on another page, be added by browser-side JavaScript, or have been unavailable temporarily.

How to read “Yes”, “No” and “Pending”

Yes means our crawler detected the defined signal. No means it did not detect that signal in the observed homepage response. Pending means a reliable result is not available yet. These labels do not assess design quality, sales performance, trustworthiness or customer satisfaction.

HTTPS available

HTTPS encrypts information exchanged between a visitor’s browser and the website. We mark this “Yes” when the store’s public homepage is available through a secure HTTPS connection.

How to improve

  • Install and renew a valid TLS certificate.
  • Redirect HTTP traffic permanently to HTTPS.
  • Remove mixed-content requests for images, scripts and styles.
  • Check that both the root and www domain reach the intended secure website.

Homepage reachable

This means our crawler received a successful public response within its bounded timeout. A temporary outage, DNS error, slow server, access block or repeated server error can produce “No”.

How to improve

  • Monitor availability and origin errors continuously.
  • Use caching and a content delivery network where appropriate.
  • Keep DNS records and certificate configuration current.
  • Allow clearly identified, non-abusive public measurement bots where your security policy permits.

Meta description

A meta description is a short summary placed in the page’s HTML metadata. Search engines may use it when presenting a page, although they can choose different text.

How to improve

Add one accurate, useful description to the homepage. Explain what the store sells and which market it serves. Avoid keyword repetition, unsupported claims and identical descriptions across every page.

<meta name="description" content="Shop …">

Commerce schema

Structured data is machine-readable information, usually expressed as JSON-LD using Schema.org vocabulary. Technical methodology v0.1 checks the homepage HTML for Product, Offer or ItemList types.

Product markup normally belongs on individual product pages. Therefore, “No” on an ECIndex profile does not prove the website lacks Product schema elsewhere. Homepage ItemList markup should only be used when it accurately describes a visible list of products; markup must reflect content users can actually see.

How to improve responsibly

  • Add Product and Offer information to eligible product pages.
  • Include accurate name, image, price, currency, availability and canonical URL data where applicable.
  • Keep structured prices and availability synchronized with visible content.
  • Validate syntax and monitor search-engine enhancement reports.
  • Do not add misleading markup solely to obtain an ECIndex signal.

Practical improvement checklist

Measure first

Reproduce the current response and identify whether the issue is persistent.

Fix the source

Update the platform, theme, server or integration responsible for the signal.

Validate

Check rendered pages, source HTML and relevant standards after publishing.

Request a refresh

Ask ECIndex to observe the public homepage again after a material change.

This guide is educational and does not guarantee search visibility, ranking improvement or commercial results. Read the complete ranking methodology for weights, limitations and governance.