The previous article in this series helps you understand the various types of product you can create in WooCommerce. Before we move forward to learning how to create each type of product, it’s important to know how to organize your products efficiently. Why?

It has a big impact on user experience – organizing your products neatly and logically helps shoppers easily browse and view your products. Before converting customers into adding items to cart, the last thing you would want is customers getting confused about what collections of products available and where to find what they’re looking for on your store.

It’s good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Doing SEO for an eCommerce website is very challenging since duplicate content is confusing for Google. If you invest heavily on SEO to acquire organic traffic, building a good website structure is critical to the ranking. Good site structure increases the likelihood Google will understand your website and show it to users who search relevant keywords.

In WooCommerce, you have categories and tags to structure and organize your products very easily and effectively. Let’s see how these features work:

Set up WooCommerce Product Categories:

This setting allows you to classify your products into categories, for example: men – women – children. It’s possible to create sub-categories under a parent category, for example, in women category there are top, bottom, beachwear, jacket….categories.

Open Products >> Categories, you will see the list of categories on the right and fields to add a new category on the left.

WooCommerce product categories

  • Name: name your category how you want it to show on your website
  • Slug: this is the user friendly and URL valid name of the category
  • Parent category: if you’re creating a child category, choose one of the existing categoryies as the parent category. Otherwise, choose None.
  • Description (optional): this part by default does not show up, though some themes may show it. If you’re using a theme that shows category description on storefront, write a short sentence to tell customers about it. Otherwise, this field is unnecessary.

You can drag and drop to move categories position as how you want to show them on website:

move categories

After creating categories, you will assign each product to categories on the product sheet. On the right-hand colume, find the Product categories module where you can pick what categories the product belongs to. More than one category can be assigned to one product.

assign category

How categories are presented on your shop depends on the theme. Below is an example of how categories and sub categories are present on the homepage of a WooCommerce store:

how categories show

Set up WooCommerce Product Tags:

Tags also play a role in classifying your products, but are usually used to label products based on their similar features. Using both categories and tags is like categorizing your products both horizontally and vertically.

For example, beside classifying products into men, women, children categories, you can add leather, cotton, wool tags to help customers find products by different materials.

Creating product tags is similar to creating categories:

add tag

In the product sheet, you will find the Product tags module right below the Product categories module. Just type in the tags to assign to your product:

assign tags

That’s it. By using categories and tags effectively, you will handle the product classification at more ease, enhance user experience for customers browsing on your shop, and increase the chance your website will rank higher for target keywords on search engines.

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