# How to Hide Products in WooCommerce: A Beginner’s Guide
So, you’ve got a WooCommerce store humming along, but you need to temporarily or permanently remove some products from view. Maybe they’re out of stock, discontinued, or simply awaiting a price change. Whatever the reason, you don’t want customers stumbling across them. This guide will show you several ways to hide products in WooCommerce, making your store cleaner and more professional.
Why Hide Products in WooCommerce?
Before diving into the *how*, let’s quickly cover the *why*. There are several perfectly valid reasons to hide a product:
- Out of stock items: Displaying perpetually out-of-stock items is frustrating for customers and can damage your brand reputation. Hiding them prevents disappointment.
- Seasonal products: Christmas ornaments in July? Not ideal. Hiding seasonal items until they’re relevant keeps your store focused and appealing.
- Products under development: Don’t let customers see unfinished or incomplete offerings. Hiding Explore this article on How To Integrate Ach Into Woocommerce them prevents premature sales and potential negative reviews.
- Discontinued products: Removing discontinued products declutters your store and avoids confusion.
- Internal testing: You might have products you’re testing or only want certain people to see.
Methods to Hide Products in WooCommerce
There are a few approaches to hiding products, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. We’ll cover the most common and user-friendly methods.
1. Using the “Inventory” Tab (Simplest Method)
This is the easiest way to hide a product if it’s out of stock. WooCommerce automatically makes out-of-stock products unavailable to purchase *if* you have enabled the setting.
* Steps:
1. Go to Products > Discover insights on How To Setup Paylike In Woocommerce All Products in your WordPress admin dashboard.
2. Click on the product you want to hide.
3. Navigate to the Inventory tab.
4. Set the stock quantity to 0. WooCommerce will automatically mark the product as “out of stock.”
5. (Optional) Check the box “Out of stock visibility” to control how the product is displayed (e.g., completely hidden, or shown but marked as “out of stock”).
Important Note: This method only hides the product from the shop page and search results if “Out of stock visibility” is set to “Hide out of stock products”. If you need a more versatile hiding option, consider other methods.
2. Using Product Categories and Attributes (For Organized Hiding)
If you want to hide multiple products at once based on category or attributes, this method offers more efficiency. For example, if you have a whole category of seasonal products you want to hide, you can just hide the category:
* Steps:
1. Go to Products > Categories Discover insights on How To Add Pagination In Woocommerce Shop Page Shortcode or Products > Attributes.
2. Find the relevant category or attribute you want to hide.
3. Edit the category/attribute.
4. Set the visibility to “Hidden”.
3. Using a Plugin (For Advanced Control)
For more fine-grained control, a plugin can be your best friend. Many plugins offer advanced features for managing product visibility. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), for example, allows you to add custom fields to products. You could create a custom field labeled “Hide Product” and use that field to control visibility.
Example (Requires ACF Plugin):
You would need to:
1. Create a custom field using ACF.
2. Then, you could create a custom query using PHP to filter out products where this field Check out this post: How To Get Woocommerce Product Category To Display In Sequence is checked. This requires some coding knowledge.
//This is a simplified example and requires adaptation based on your specific ACF field setup. add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'hide_products_by_custom_field' ); function hide_products_by_custom_field( $query ) { if ( is_shop() || is_product_category() || is_product_tag() ) { //Check if it's a shop page query $query->set( 'meta_query', array( array( 'key' => 'hide_product', //Replace with your ACF field name 'compare' => '!=', 'value' => '1', //Replace with your value for 'hide' ) ) ); } return $query; }
This code will exclude products where the custom field `hide_product` has a value of `1`. Remember to replace `’hide_product’` with your actual ACF field name and `’1’` with the value you’ve assigned to indicate that a product should be hidden.
Warning: Always back up your website before implementing code changes. If you are not comfortable with coding, use a different method.
Conclusion
Hiding products in WooCommerce is essential for maintaining a clean, professional, and user-friendly online store. Choose the method that best suits your needs and technical skills. Remember to always test your changes after implementing any of these methods. If you are uncertain, start with the simplest option—using the inventory settings. If that’s not enough, move on to categories and attributes, or consider using plugins for more advanced control.
