How to create a custom WooCommerce category page design

Are you looking for an alternative to the default WooCommerce category page design in your WordPress theme? Creating a custom design for your WooCommerce product categories lets you offer an optimized shopping experience. This can have a positive effect on your store's bottom line.

WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world, powering over 30% of all online stores. With its user-friendly interface and easy-to-use features, WooCommerce makes it easy for anyone to set up an online store and start selling products or services.

One of the key components of a successful online store is a well-designed category page. Category pages are important for organizing and displaying products in a way that makes sense to customers. They allow customers to easily navigate your store, find the products they are looking for, and make informed purchasing decisions.

A category page in WooCommerce displays a list of products that belong to a specific category, such as "Shirts" or "Shoes." By default, WooCommerce provides a basic category page layout that includes a product grid, product filters, and paging. However, these default category pages can be limiting and may not provide the best user experience for your customers.

To truly stand out and create a unique online store experience, it's important to customize your WooCommerce category pages. By customizing your category pages, you can create a visually stunning and user-friendly shopping experience that reflects your brand and helps increase sales.

2 ways to customize the WooCommerce category page

In this post, we'll mostly be focussing on how to turn your WooCommerce category pages into one-page product order forms. Here's an example of what that looks like:

We'll explore the importance of customizing category pages in WooCommerce and provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a custom WooCommerce category page design with the WooCommerce Product Table plugin.

WooCommerce Product Table speeds up the shopping experience by letting customers view and select products directly on a customized category page. It's the ideal way to customize the category pages in your store.

The benefits of using a table layout for your category pages

Most themes' category page designs look something like this:

The exact category page design may look a bit different. For example, you may have created a WooCommerce theme layout using tools like Elementor and Astra. However, a WooCommerce category page generally contains a list of products similar to the above.

That layout is fine for some situations, but it limits the number of products that you can display. It also restricts how much information you can provide about each product (though adding product quick view buttons is one way to mitigate this).

Woo Multistore has written about the importance of designing the WooCommerce category page in a way that boosts conversions. A table layout helps you overcome the shortcomings by displaying more products and information in a compact layout that ends up using less space, as well as adding extra navigation features such as searching and filtering.

That means you can get more of your products/product details in front of shoppers' eyeballs, which ensures they can see your whole catalog and ups your chance of them making a purchase.

You'll also see SEO benefits with search engines as you can display more custom content on a fully custom page (or landing pages too). This lets you show products that are relevant, and then add contextual text too. All of this should be rewarded with higher rankings.

While this type of layout can benefit all types of ecommerce stores, it's especially helpful for:

• Wholesale stores
• Digital files (videos, audio files, ebooks, etc.)
• Restaurants
• Product catalogs
• ...lots more!

Creating a custom category page in WooCommerce

Here's a brief summary of the steps involved in creating a WooCommerce custom category page in WooCommerce:

1. Understand your brand and target audience: Before you start designing your category page, it's important to have a clear understanding of your brand and target audience. This will help you make design decisions that align with your brand's personality and appeal to your target customers.
2. Customize your category page template:  To save you from having to modify templates using PHP, we’ll do this using the WooCommerce Product Table plugin. This replaces the basic layout on your category archive pages with an optimized order form view.
3. Test and refine: Finally, test your new category page design to ensure it is user-friendly and functions as expected. Make any necessary adjustments and continue to refine your design over time to optimize the user experience and increase conversions.

How to create a custom WooCommerce category page design with WooCommerce Product Table

Another benefit of using a table layout for your WooCommerce product category page design is that you can set everything up without needing any special technical knowledge.

To do this, you'll use the WooCommerce Product Table plugin. This converts the design of your WooCommerce category page into an interactive order form. You can customize it however you like and add filters, search boxes, pagination, and more. That way, customers can quickly select multiple products, quantities, and variations, and add them to their cart in a single click 🔥

You can enable the order form view on your product category pages, main shop page, product search results - anywhere you like. I recommend using it wherever customers would benefit from a faster way to find and select products.

Keep reading to learn how to transform your WooCommerce category pages with quick order forms.

1. Install WooCommerce Product Table

First, get WooCommerce Product Table and install it on your WordPress site. When you activate it, the interactive table builder wizard will open. You can also launch this at any time via Products → Product Tables.

2. Design the category page order form

The table builder will guide you through configuring the order form that will appear on your product category pages.

1. Select the category page template - On the first page, choose the option to "Add to a page using a block or shortcode".
   

   

2. Select the category page template - Select 'Product categories', plus any other WooCommerce templates you want to use the order form on.
   

   

3. Select columns - Choose which columns of product data to display in the order form. You can display whatever data you like. Click the pencil icon to rename the column.
   

   

4. More options - Set up the rest of the table as needed. For example, you can replace the add to cart buttons with checkboxes to make it quicker to add multiple products. You can also add filter dropdowns to the top of the category page order form, and decide how to sort the products in each category.

Once you've created the table, view a category page or sub-category. You will see your new WooCommerce category page design, complete with the interactive order form:

3. Make your WooCommerce categories more searchable with filters

If you want to add more search and filter tools to your WooCommerce categories, you have two options:

1. Add the default WooCommerce widgets to the category page sidebar. These are quite basic and only support attributes, price and rating. They can only appear as dropdowns or checkboxes.
2. For more professional category page filters, install the WooCommerce Product Filters plugin. This lets you add filters for absolutely any type of product data - filter by attribute, category, and more. You can choose from a wide range of styles for each filter, such as clickable images and color swatches.

The Product Filters plugin provides the most sophisticated way to add WooCommerce filter by category to your shop page and category pages. It can add enhanced filters to the top of the category page, as well as sidebar filter widgets.

To use WooCommerce Product Filters it on your custom category pages, follow these steps:

1. Install WooCommerce Product Filters.
2. To add filters to the top of the category page:
   1. In the setup wizard, select the filter group that you want to display on the WooCommerce category page. The plugin creates a recommended group for you, so you can just use that.
   2. Next, go to Products → Filters and add filters to the filter group which you selected in the setup wizard.
3. To add filter widgets to the category page sidebar:
   1. Navigate to Products → Filters and add filters to your default filter group (or create a new group).
   2. Go to Appearance → Widgets and add the 'Product Filter' widget.
   3. In the widget, select the name of your filter group.

Now, your custom WooCommerce category pages will show the advanced filters. Neat!

How to create a custom WooCommerce category page design with code

So far, we’ve learned how to use the WooCommerce Product Table plugin to create customized WooCommerce category pages. That’s a great option because it’s a no-code solution. However, if you have development experience then you can also use code to create your own custom category page.

Before you start making any changes to your category page, it’s important to plan out the layout and structure of the page. Consider the elements that you want to include on your page, such as product images, descriptions, and pricing information. Think about the order in which you want these elements to appear on the page, and how you want them to be styled.

Once you have a basic layout in mind, you can start adding custom PHP, CSS, and HTML to your WooCommerce product category page. This can be done by modifying the existing WooCommerce template files or by creating a custom WooCommerce category page template file from scratch. You can use CSS to change the look and feel of your WooCommerce category page, while HTML can be used to add new elements to the page.

You'll want to work with the archive-product.php file in your theme or child theme. You can also use this same approach to edit your WooCommerce product pages via the single-product file or other parts of your storefront.

Unfortunately, because you'll need to directly edit the code in your theme's template files to make each change, this method isn't accessible to non-developers. We recommend reaching out to Codeable if you need some help or sticking with the simpler table layout method above.

Testing your custom category page on different devices and browsers

After designing and customizing your WooCommerce product category page, it's important to test it on different devices and browsers to ensure that it looks and functions properly. Here are some steps to follow for testing your custom WooCommerce category page:

If you’re still getting problems, then it might be better to use a plugin like WooCommerce Product Table which comes with a WooCommerce edit category page feature. That way, you can be sure that your custom WooCommerce category page is fully tested and works perfectly.

Understanding WooCommerce category pages

Before diving into the process of creating a custom WooCommerce category page, it’s important to understand what category pages are and their purpose. Simply put, category pages are used to group similar products together on an online store. For example, if you sell clothing, you might have categories for men’s clothing, women’s clothing, and children’s clothing. Each category page would then display products related to that category.

How do category pages work in WooCommerce?

WooCommerce comes with built-in functionality to categorize your products. Essentially, category pages in WooCommerce are dynamically generated web pages that list products assigned to a specific category. These pages allow shoppers to browse through products of their interest and help you showcase your offerings in a more organized way.

However, by default, WooCommerce uses a generic template for all category pages, which can be limiting for businesses that want to showcase their products in a unique and more visually appealing manner. This is where customizing the product category page design can come in handy. With the right tweaks, you can make your category pages stand out and better reflect your brand and product offerings.

A well-designed category page can help improve the discoverability of your products and make it easier for shoppers to navigate through your site, ultimately leading to more sales.

The importance of category pages for SEO and user experience

Effective category pages are essential for organizing products, improving user experience, and boosting SEO rankings. Properly categorizing your products and optimizing your category pages can help your online store stand out in a crowded e-commerce market.

Not only do custom pages improve navigation, but they also play an important role in establishing a strong brand identity. By incorporating your brand's colors, typography, and product images, you can create a consistent look and feel throughout your store that helps build trust and credibility with your customers.

In addition to improving user experience, well-optimized category pages can also boost your store’s search engine rankings. Properly categorizing your products and optimizing your page content can help search engines better understand your site's structure and content, making it easier for them to remember your site. This can result in higher visibility and more traffic to your store.

Create your custom WooCommerce category page design today!

By using the WooCommerce Product Table plugin, you can create a custom WooCommerce product category page design that offers a more user-friendly way to display your products. This table-based layout allows you to showcase more products and provide additional details about each one. Moreover, you can incorporate search and filter options to help your customers easily find what they're looking for.

This custom WooCommerce product category page design can improve the shopping experience for your customers. As well as ultimately increase sales and revenue for your online store. Unlike directly editing your archive WooCommerce category page template file, setting up the WooCommerce Product Table plugin is easy and doesn't require any specialized technical knowledge.

By making use of this plugin, you can efficiently and effectively connect your customers with the products they want. As well as displaying your products in an organized and visually appealing way.

Get started today and create a more effective way for shoppers to browse product categories at your WooCommerce store.