Protect Your WooCommerce Categories

WooCommerce Protected Categories is a WordPress plugin that adds access control features to WooCommerce product categories. It enables store owners to password-protect categories, restrict them to specific users or roles, and hide products from unauthorized visitors.

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.

WooCommerce Protected Categories offers three types of protection:

• Password Protection: Password protection requires visitors to enter a specific password to access the category. Each category can have multiple passwords, and the same password can unlock multiple categories.
• User Protection: User protection restricts categories to specific individual WordPress users. Only the selected users can view the category when logged into their accounts.
• Role Protection: Role protection limits access to users with specific WordPress roles (such as wholesale_customer or vip_member). All users with the designated role automatically gain access when logged in.

Each protection type serves different use cases: password protection works well for temporary access or shared credentials, user protection suits customer-specific products, and role protection is ideal for membership tiers or wholesale customers.

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.

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.

Setting up password-protected categories involves these steps:

1. Install and activate the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin.
2. Navigate to Products → Categories in your WordPress admin.
3. Edit the category you want to protect.
4. Select "Protected" from the Visibility dropdown and choose either password protection, or user or role protection.
5. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Protected Categories and choose whether to hide the category from public areas. You can also edit the password login form which is used for your password protected categories.

The protection automatically applies to all products within the category and any sub-categories. Customers must enter the correct password on the login form to access the protected content, or log into their account.cific products, and role protection is ideal for membership tiers or wholesale customers.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

WooCommerce Protected Categories works with any well-coded WordPress theme and sits alongside the rest of your store's plugins. It works through WooCommerce's own category and visibility handling. You can protect categories without hiring a developer, writing code, or editing theme templates.

The Barn2 theme compatibility guide lists the themes we test with. If you do find a styling or compatibility issue, our support team will help.

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.

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 11.0.1)
• WordPress 6.1 or greater (tested to 7.0.4)
• PHP 7.4 or greater (tested to 8.5)
• MySQL 5.7.8 or greater / MariaDB 10.3 or greater

Several offers are available if you are a nonprofit or wish to buy multiple plugins:

• 2-plugin bundle - Get WooCommerce Protected Categories together with WooCommerce Product Table at a reduced fixed price. Select the bundle in the pricing table above.
• Multi-buy discount - Add any two or more Barn2 plugins to your cart and get 40% off automatically at checkout. The most expensive plugin stays at full price, and every other plugin is reduced by 40%. No coupon needed.
• All Access Pass - For the best possible value, get our All Access Pass which gives you VIP access to our entire plugin suite including WooCommerce Protected Categories.
• Charity discount - Registered nonprofits get 15% discount off.