A normal WooCommerce store could stock hundreds of types of products and inventory items. As a store owner, you should be able to help your visitors easily find what they’re looking for. Rather than having them switch to another store due to your seemingly endless list of product variants.
That’s when a quick and easy WooCommerce category filter comes in handy.
Today in this guide, we’ll walk you through how to add a filter by category widget to your WooCommerce store. When you’re looking to save customers’ clicks and help them find the product they’re looking for faster, then you’ll need to add a filter by category to your WooCommerce sidebar.
We’ll show you how to get this done by the end of this guide.
Why Add Filter by Category to WooCommerce
How frequently have you visited an online store and ended up clicking in reverse and advances through different product pages attempting to find what you’re searching for?
This confusing system is extensive and can prompt choice exhaustion for clients. On the off chance that clients can’t channel through items in your store, they can’t find the product they’re searching for rapidly enough.
And if they can’t find it, they can’t get it.
Research on client research says all that’s needed is 15 seconds for a guest to choose if they will click off your site or not (and some even say 0.05 seconds!). So when you just have as long as 15 seconds to establish a decent first connection, you’ll need to ensure you rapidly lead your clients to the right items.
The good news is, that there’s a method for diminishing the number of clicks a client makes while perusing your store. The procedure referred to will be to further develop the product categories on your shop and classification pages.
Your category pages have plenty of possibilities. With only a couple of changes, they could make you more deals and immensely further develop the shopping experience for your clients. These improvements need to require no coding information and can have an enormous profit from the shopping experience of your store.
In the following section, we’ll begin with the main method. Which is to add a filter by category to your WooCommerce shop sidebar.
How to Add Filter by Category to WooCommerce
So let’s get to it. Here’s how to add a filter by category widget to your WooCommerce filter by category and shop pages:
- From your WordPress sidebar, go to Appearance > Widgets.
- On the next page, you should see a white box at the top with a plus symbol.
- Click the plus symbol and type ‘Product Categories List’ into the search area. Click the Product Categories List widget to add it.
- The widget will now appear on the Widgets page. You’ll be able to customize how the categories display if you’ll include product counts, show empty categories, and more.
- Once you’re happy with your selection, click the blue Update button at the very top of the page.
Now your customers will be able to filter through product categories using your shop’s sidebar.
How to Create a WooCommerce Filter by Category Dropdown
If you’re looking to change your category filters to a dropdown instead of a list, take the following steps:
- While you are still editing your Product Categories List widget, change List to Dropdown in the List Settings section on the right.
- Next, you need to click the blue Update button at the top of the page.
So now we’ve improved your WooCommerce category page by adding a filter by a category, let’s take it one step further. In the next section, we’ll show you how to take your product filters to the next level.
Improve Your WooCommerce Product Filters Further
Adding category filters to your shop sidebar is a fantastic place to start. But to really save customers’ clicks and help them find products faster, we can take it one step further.
Improve Filters with Color and Image Swatches
In WooCommerce, variable product attributes are displayed as simple words with checkboxes when filtering. You can make this experience so much better and more visual for the customer.
With WooCommerce Attribute Swatches, users will have an easier and clearer way to search or filter items in your store. And instead of simple words or checkboxes, customers will be able to filter with swatches. This makes it much quicker and easier for them to find the product they’re looking for.
Conclusion
The quality of your product filters could be a make or break for your customers. They could either find what they’re looking for without friction, or they could struggle and leave your store without buying a thing. Therefore you need to add the right product filter on your store in order to increase your conversion rate.
Now that you are aware of the great importance and enormous benefits of WooCommerce filter by a category, we encourage you to set up this function as soon as possible.