Can I use WooCommerce Protected Categories to hide my entire store?
The WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin is designed to hide or protect specific areas within your WooCommerce store, or to show different products to different people. You can use it to hide your entire store from public view, without any public shopping areas, although it is not really designed for this purpose.
This is how to hide your whole store using WooCommerce Protected Categories:
- Create a main category for your store in Products → Product Categories and protect it. You can then structure your store by adding sub-categories and products. You don’t need to protect any of the individual sub-categories or their products as they will automatically inherit the same protection as the main category.
- Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Protected Categories and untick the boxes that show the protected categories and products in the public-facing store and menus.
For added security, we recommend using WooCommerce Protected Categories with our dedicated plugin WooCommerce Private Store. This has extra features such as hiding links to the cart, checkout and account page; and blocking all your WooCommerce content from search engines and sitemaps. The rest of your store (e.g. the homepage and blog) remain public as usual.
You can use WooCommerce Private Store to make your entire store private and hidden from public view. You can then use WooCommerce Protected Categories to show different categories to different people, as required. The two plugins are designed to work perfectly together.