Protect Specific categories. Keep the rest of your store public.

Perfect for private wholesale areas, customer-specific products, and more.

  • Sell private products to each client, protected by a password or account login
  • Perfect for photographers, schools, sports clubs and other industries
  • Private login page directs each customer to their hidden products
  • Create a hidden area for B2B clients or members
  • Accessible only to those with the correct password or user role – pre-approve your customers
  • No need to create a separate wholesale shop
WooCommerce B2B plugin
WooCommerce Password Protected Categories

FINE GRAINED PROTECTION

  • Easy for you and your customers: they just login to their account, or enter the password
  • Optionally hide protected categories from menus and widgets
  • Restrict WooCommerce categories (including sub-categories) by password, role or even individual users

What Our Customers Say

WooCommerce Protected Categories consistently receives 5-star reviews.

Wanted to hide WooCommerce categories - which to my dismay is not offered as standard - and stumbled upon this plugin. It does exactly what it promises. Installation and setup took just a few minutes!

Dave Mansoor Barn2 Plugin Customer Testimonial Dave Mansoor - Netherlands

Great plugin. The install and configuration is very easy and has a good concise set of options. Barn2 are very helpful and clearly work hard to maintain a high standard of work and client support.

Darrell Martin Barn2 Plugin Customer Darrell Martin - UK

Rated 4.98 out of 5 stars

Packed With Features

The most comprehensive protection plugin for WooCommerce

Knowledge Base

Simple Password Protection

Customers enter a password on a central login form, and are redirected to the correct hidden category. Supports multiple passwords for each category.

Tutorials

Role & User Restricted Categories

Restrict WooCommerce categories to specific user roles or individual users. Logged in users automatically see their protected categories.

Plugin Support

Protects Products & Subcategories

Once you've protected a WooCommerce category, its products and any sub-categories automatically inherit the same protection. Protect areas of your store!

Plugin Support

Hide From Your Public Store

Choose whether to show or hide your password protected categories and their products. Hidden content is invisible from public parts of your store.

Plugin Support

Hidden From Menus & Sidebars

Optionally hide protected categories from menus and widgets. After a category is unlocked, your menu links and widgets magically appear!

Plugin Support

User-friendly

Set up in minutes. Your customers simply log into their user account or enter a password to unlock an entire category, its sub-categories and products.

We use Barn2's WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin to sell custom products to an expanding list of over 120 clients. The plugin has performed flawlessly for the past 18 months. I couldn't be happier and the service Barn2 provided was outstanding.

David Reid Barn2 Plugin Customer David Reid Match Up Badges - Australia

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Two Plugin Bundle

WooCommerce Protected Categories + Product Table

Choose this option if you want a searchable order form layout for your products.

Display hidden WooCommerce Product Table categories in a table
  • Protected categories
    Restrict access to your WooCommerce product categories
  • 3 protection options
    Unlock products based on password, user or role
  • Product tables
    List any or all of your products in a user-friendly order form

$ 139 (save $49)

One Plugin

WooCommerce Protected Categories

If you just want to restrict access to categories without changing the layout, then choose this option.

Restrict access to WooCommerce categories
  • Protected categories
    Restrict access to your WooCommerce product categories
  • 3 protection options
    Unlock products based on password, user or role
  • Product tables
    List any or all of your products in a user-friendly order form

$ 89

Billed annually, unless marked as lifetime. If you let an annual license expire then you can keep using the plugin but won’t receive any more updates, new features or support. Lifetime licenses include lifetime updates and support. You can upgrade your license at any time.

Your Trusted Partner

As your trusted plugin provider, we can build amazing things together

Knowledge Base

Expert support team

We're here to help. Our friendly support team are always on hand if you get stuck, need guidance or have a question.

Tutorials

Detailed documentation

Our searchable Knowledge Base contains over 700 articles. It's the best way to get instant answers, tips and guidance.

Plugin Support

Videos & tutorials

We've published 100s of step-by-step videos and tutorials on how to use our plugins for a wide range of purposes.

Plugin Support

Exclusive discounts

We've partnered with 50+ other WordPress companies to give our customers discounts to a wide range of products.

Plugin Support

Fast response times

We pride ourselves on our fast support times. We typically respond to support requests within hours, or even minutes.

Plugin Support

Money back guarantee

If you're not 100% happy with your purchase, we offer a full 30 day money back guarantee. No questions asked.

FAQ

Our world-class support starts here: how can we help?

How does the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin work?

It provides a 'Visibility' option for each category (similar to that for posts and pages) allowing you to set the visibility. You can choose whether to make each WooCommerce category password protected, private, or restricted to specific WordPress user roles or individual user accounts. This makes it the most comprehensive WooCommerce protection plugin on the market.

This plugin improves on the basic options built into WordPress by allowing you to protect entire categories and all their products in one go. It also adds extra protection options so that you can restrict categories and their products to specific logged in users or roles. Not only does this save time, it's a more complete solution than having to password protect every product individually.

How do WooCommerce password protected categories work?

If you password protect a WooCommerce category, it will lock down the whole category and any products within that category. Users must enter a correct password in order to view the category page, or any individual products within that category or its sub-categories. Each category can have one or more unique passwords and you can protect as many categories as you like.

Once a correct password has been entered for a category, it will 'unlock' that category so that the category page itself and any products within the category are visible and can be purchased.

How do WooCommerce user and role protected categories work?

You can set any of your product categories to only be available to specific logged in users or entire user roles. Simply choose this option for the category, and select one or more roles/users.

Customers with the correct role or user will automatically be able to access the category when they log into their user account.

Can I hide protected product categories from my public shop?

By default, protected WooCommerce categories and products are listed in the public store, but customers must enter a correct password to access them.

If you prefer, you can completely hide protected categories (and their products) from the shop. Simply untick the box on the plugin settings page. This will hide them from your main store and other locations such as related products and sidebar widgets.

You can also control whether links to protected categories appear in navigation menus. Public visitors will never know that your hidden categories and their products exist!

Can I have a public and wholesale store on the same website?

WooCommerce Protected Categories is popular for building a private wholesale store that runs alongside your public-facing shop. However, it wasn't built specifically for wholesale and you might prefer our dedicated wholesale plugin - WooCommerce Wholesale Pro.

WooCommerce Wholesale Pro has lots of extra features for wholesale, including:

  • Wholesale registration form (with or without moderation).
  • Dedicated wholesale login page.
  • Unlimited wholesale roles.
  • Sell the same products to public and wholesale customers, while showing each person the correct price for their role.
  • Works with our WooCommerce Product Table plugin for creating quick one-page wholesale order forms.

Can I create customer-specific WooCommerce categories?

Lots of people use WooCommerce Protected Categories to sell hidden products that are only available to one customer. For example, photographers use it to sell photos that are personal to each client.

Create one or more hidden categories for each customer and either password protect it or lock it down to a specific user account.

For WooCommerce password protected categories, the customer uses the central login form and is automatically directed to their own hidden category. For user protected categories, we have provided instructions on how to direct each individual customer to their private category after logging into their account.

Does it work with sub-categories?

Yes, the plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce sub-categories. Protect a parent category, and all its sub-categories (and their products) are automatically protected in the same way.

The benefit is that if you have hierarchical categories, you don't have to protect each sub-category individually - just protect the parent category and you're good to go.

What if my product is in more than one category?

WooCommerce Protected Categories takes a secure approach where possible. If a product is in two categories - one public and one protected - the product will still be protected, even if accessed from the public category. If you want to sell the same product in a public and protected category, then we recommend using the free Duplicate Post plugin to quickly clone your products.

Each product can only be in one password protected category. You can add a single product to multiple user or role protected categories.

Can I make my entire WooCommerce store private?

Yes! Simply protect all your categories. However, you might be better off with our dedicated WooCommerce Private Store plugin instead.

Will it work with my theme?

We have tested protected WooCommerce categories thoroughly with a variety of free and premium themes and are confident the plugin will work with your theme. If you're using a theme that supports WooCommerce (i.e. includes its own WooCommerce templates), then it will work great as long as the theme uses the standard WooCommerce 'hooks' in its template files. Most - if not all - WooCommerce themes use these hooks so there shouldn't be a problem.

Does it work in my language?

You can use our WordPress Protected Categories plugin with most multilingual plugins including WeGlot, TranslatePress and WPML. This makes it easy to translate your login page and protected categories into any language.

What are the purchase options?

Clicking the Buy button above will take you to the purchase options. You can choose either a Lifetime or Annual software license.

  • Lifetime licenses never expire. It's a one-time payment which includes all future plugin updates, new features and support, forever.
  • Annual licenses are renewed once a year. As long as you have an active license, you will receive support, plugin updates and new features. If your license ever expires then you can continue using the plugin, but won't receive any further updates or support.

You can also choose the number of sites that you can use the plugin on.

What are the minimum requirements for running the plugin?

WooCommerce Protected Categories is fully tested with the latest versions of WordPress and WooCommerce. We always recommend running the most up-to-date version, but we also support older installations:

  • WooCommerce 7.2 or greater (tested to 9.4.2)
  • WordPress 6.1 or greater (tested to 6.6.2)
  • PHP 7.4 or greater (tested to 8.3.13)
  • MySQL 5.7.8 or greater / MariaDB 10.3 or greater

Current version

Version:2.7.5
Last updated:19 Sep 2024
Changelog:View

Screenshots

See the plugin in action, or check out the demo.

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