A Guide to WooCommerce Categories

As a business owner in the digital world, you need to learn the ultimate guide to WooCommerce categories as a way of maximizing the full potential of the biggest eCommerce platform in the world. With the online market reaching more than $5 trillion in 2025, the potential of crafting a name for yourself is possible with WooCommerce hosting. 

A cleanly arranged WooCommerce shop with different categories can attract more customers.  If you’re new to WooCommerce, this step-by-step guide is your compass towards organizing your products into categories to help guide users to the right categories on your shop page.  

After reading through this blog, you will learn how to display product categories using WooCommerce, how categories make it easy for you to show specific products, the must-have WooCommerce plugins, and the various tips that can make your product category stand out from others. 

What Are WooCommerce Categories?

WooCommerce categories are basically classification system that allow to display categories in your WooCommerce store that are similar. Thanks to these specific categories, the chances of clustering is minimal and people who visit your online store can easily find what they want. 

Categories in a WooCommerce marketplace allows you to add and sort products, increase navigation when customers use the WooCommerce, and boost your store rankings on search engines through SEO.  

Classification of Products in WooCommerce

Categories are hierarchical when it comes to the WooCommerce site, having parent and child categories. Here is the classification of product category pages in WooCommerce: 

1. WooCommerce Product Categories 

A product category display is the main taxonomy for classifying similar products in your WooCommerce store. The product categories on any page are based on ranking, allowing your product categories tab to have subcategories. As an illustration, an electronic category can have a number of categories like Power banks, Laptops, TV, and Smartphones under it. 

Having product categories on your shop page can enhance the structure of your page and help visitors moving around your pages easily without getting confused. Furthermore, when you display your product categories, your pages will get indexed faster by Google. 

2. Product Tags  

WooCommerce doesn’t rank tags based on importance, but they are necessary because it helps search engines understand what the product is about. Since you cannot add subcategories in tags, they can be useful when it comes to ranking, showing characteristics of popular products, and indexing.   

3. Product Attributes 

In WooCommerce setups, the role of product attributes is for showcasing the unique features of each product like type of material, size, and color. Attributes in product categories might be vital for layered filtering and making different variations of a single product. A variable product like T-shirt can have different variation in size (small or large), Material (silk or cotton), and color (white or black). 

6 Steps on How to Handle Product Categories in WooCommerce

When it comes to customize your WooCommerce and adding any product categories you want, there are 6 simple steps that can help you add product and show categories you want to display.   

Step 1: Go to the WooCommerce category page

To display categories in WooCommerce, you will need to login with your username and password on your WordPress Site. If you don’t have a WordPress, you can get yours at Hostonce. After logging in, go to the section that shows Product > Categories within WooCommerce. On this shop page display, you can add custom, manage, or hide empty categories.

Step 2: Create a new category for your product page   

If you plan on adding a new product category to be displayed on the shop page, a form is provided for you to fill important information like product description, slug, name of product, parent category (if necessary), thumbnail to show category image, and how categories are displayed. 

Step 3: Customize and Assign Products to Categories

To further boost your display type when it comes to managing product categories, you can customize WooCommerce products in two major ways. The first one is using quick edit for bulk edit, which is where you choose different products, select the bulk action you want, and update or add to the menu. For the second option, you can select a product, pick the category page where you want it to be and then update. 

Step 4: Customize WooCommerce categories

You can easily change the ways to display WooCommerce categories for your page. Go to Products, then click on Categories. This is where you can edit and customize options for displaying categories or reshuffle them based on hierarchy via the Parent Category. You can also use WooCommerce shortcodes to display and rearrange categories. 

Step 5: Display product categories on your shop page.  

WooCommerce templates provides you with flexibility to change your default WooCommerce categories to how you want it to be seen on your homepage. You can decide to show only your products or categories from the homepage or use WooCommerce plugin or widget to easy navigation. If you find this difficult to comprehend, you can consult a WooCommerce expert for assistance. 

Step 6: Control the SEO of your categories with plugins   

With the help of recommended SEO plugins, you can increase the online visibility of page and gain organic traffic. These plugins allow you to use the right descriptions for your categories and improve structure for easy navigation. Example of such plugins are Rank Math or Yoast SEO. 

Best Practices for WooCommerce Categories

1. Simply display categories in WooCommerce 

Adding too many categories or using product categories widget can make your site difficult to navigate. Endeavor to keep it minimal and use categories based on their level of importance to your store. You can contact Hostonce for more guidance on how to simplify your categories. 

2. Wisely use the WooCommerce subcategories    

Subcategories allow you to gather similar products within a parent category. Be smart when using this feature and ensure that you do not have excessive parent categories to prevent clustering and high bounce rates from people who visit your page. 

3. Use relevant keywords when describing your products.  

As mentioned earlier, SEO plugins can suggest recommended keywords for your product to help boost visibility. You can use the right keywords and meta description to further tell customers who visit your page about each product. This can help to improve your eCommerce ranking in the long run.  

5. Add images that are clear and appealing. 

A clear image can speak a thousand words to a customer. If you want better engagement with your categories, use images or photos that are high-quality for each product catalog. This will create an attractive homepage for your top-level categories when you decide to apply a grid layout. 

How Category Display Can Help SEO

1. Encourage search engines to crawl and index your page.   

Google and other search engines use crawlers to understand a page before indexing it for ranking. With product categories, these crawlers can better understand what your page is about and move through every area of your site. 

2. Increase the target for relevant keywords.  

SEO allows you to rank for hundreds or thousands of keywords. By using the relevant keywords in your product categories, you can rank on different keywords and gain more traffic organically from people who are searching for what you provide. For more information how to run your eCommerce store, you can visit Hostonce Blog to learn the secrets of online marketing.

3. Rich Internal Linking

Internal linking is very important for SEO because it shows relevant information and passes link juice across a page. Search engines can better understand the full picture of your page thanks to internal linking. You can use internal links to promote pages that are not performing well on your website.  

4. Wonderful customer experience   

If the WooCommerce blocks in your page are simple to understand, you can have customers spending more time on your site instead of leaving in less than 5 seconds. A wonderful user experience is a positive indicator to search engines that people love your page, and this can help increase your visibility. 

Popular Plugins to Use for Your Categories Page in WooCommerce  

1. WooCommerce Show Single Variations: This is one of the best plugins for showing different variation of single product in your categories. The WooCommerce Show Single Variation makes it easy for customers to buy a product and your page to be user friendly to people who visit your page 

2. Category Slider for WooCommerce: On your homepage, the Slider plugin can increase the appearance of your category names by turning it into a grid or a slider. This plugin is perfect for mobile responsiveness because it shows trending categories from the highest to lowest. 

4. WooCommerce Nested Category Layout: It is used to show categories and products on the category homepage. With Nested Layout, you can add subcategories by list or grid, and product a clean UX design for your store.   

5. Yoast SEO for WooCommerce: With Yoast SEO, you can better optimize every content of your page to rank above your competitors. SEO is an important metric for online visibility, so using this plugin allows you to tailor-fit your content to reach your targeted audience. 

Conclusion

The first step towards owing a successful online store is having a domain name that is captivating. You can learn more about Hostonce domain on Twitter (X) for more information on how to advance your online growth. The ultimate guide to WooCommerce categories is your manual towards making your online store to become a digital hub for online shoppers. If you follow the steps listed in this article, you can improve the performance of your site and convert prospective clients to sales. Remember to make your categories appear based on their level of importance and avoid using too many categories to prevent clustering. 

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