Are you wondering how to hide WooCommerce products from search results?
It’ll help you clean up the search results on your site of outdated or redundant products and allow your customers to find what they’re looking for faster.
In this detailed tutorial, we’ll show you how you can exclude both specific WooCommerce products and entire product categories from search results on your site.
Here’s a table of contents to help you navigate it:
- Benefits of Hiding WooCommerce Products From Search Results
- Easiest Way to Hide WooCommerce Products From Search
Let’s begin!
Benefits of Hiding WooCommerce Products from Search Results
By hiding specific products from search results on your site, you can:
- Clean up your search results. Remove outdated or redundant products from the search results on your site to make it easier to navigate your store.
- Boost your pageviews and sales. The easier it is for users to find what they are looking for on your site, the more sales you’ll get.
- Protect sensitive content. Hide products intended for a limited range of users from public search results on your site.
- Get better control over your inventory. Exclude wholesale products and special offers from your search results with a few clicks.
With that, let’s see how you can hide specific WooCommerce products in your search results.
Easiest Way to Hide WooCommerce Products from Search
The easiest way to exclude any products from search results on your site is to use SearchWP.
SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin that has seamless integration with WooCommerce.
Using it, you can hide any WooCommerce product from search results in a few clicks and completely customize how search works on your site.
For example, with SearchWP, you can make various product attributes searchable, display search results in live mode, control the order of search results, and more.
Over 30,000 WordPress website owners already use SearchWP to enhance their search and deliver more relevant content to their visitors.
Here are some other SearchWP features that make this plugin stand out:
- Track searches of your customers. Monitor what customers are searching for on your site to predict their needs and give them the right products.
- Highlight search terms in search results. Make search terms more visible in the search results on your site so that visitors can immediately see if they’ve found what they want.
- Enable search by product tags. Let your customers perform searches by product tags to make it easier for them to browse your store and increase your sales.
- Limit search to WooCommerce products only. Exclude posts and pages from search on your site so that nothing disturbs your visitors from shopping.
Once you’ve learned why SearchWP is the #1 WordPress search plugin, let’s move on to how you can use it.
How to Hide a Single WooCommerce Product from Search
First, let’s see how you can hide a specific product from appearing in search results on your site.
Step 1: Install and Activate SearchWP on Your Site
To begin, you’ll need to get your copy of SearchWP.
Next, log in to your SearchWP dashboard and go to the Downloads tab.
Once there, press the Download SearchWP button. It’ll start downloading the SearchWP ZIP file to your computer.
When you’re finished downloading, copy your SearchWP license key on the bottom left corner of the same tab. You’ll need this key further to activate your copy of the plugin.
The following step is to upload the downloaded ZIP file to your site and install SearchWP.
Feel free to check out how to install a WordPress plugin tutorial if you need help with that.
Upon installing the plugin on your site, you’ll need to activate it with a license key.
To do that, go to your WordPress dashboard and click Activate License under SearchWP at the top panel.
Then, paste your SearchWP license key into the License field and click Activate.
After activating your license, you’ll need to install SearchWP extensions that allow you to hide WooCommerce products from search results.
Step 2: Install WooCommerce Integration Extension
To get started, navigate to SearchWP » Extensions in your WordPress dashboard.
Here you will find SearchWP extensions that you can install to further extend the plugin functionality.
The first extension you’ll need to install is the WooCommerce Integration extension.
It ensures seamless WooCommerce integration with SearchWP, so you can fully customize search in your store.
Once you find the WooCommerce Integration extension, click Install in its section.
The next step is to install another extension called Exclude UI.
Step 3: Install Exclude UI extension
This extension adds the “Exclude from search” checkbox to the post and page editor. By ticking this checkbox, you can hide any page from search with a single click.
To install the Exclude UI extension, find it on the Extensions tab and click Install under its section.
After installing the extensions, you’re ready to start hiding WooCommerce products from search results.
Step 4: Choose the Product You Want to Hide
To get started, navigate to Products in your WordPress dashboard.
Then, click on a product you want to hide from appearing in search. For example, let’s say we want to hide Red Beanie from search on our test site.
Once you get to the product editor, tick the Exclude from search checkbox on the right panel.
When you’re done, press Update to save your changes.
You just successfully excluded this specific WooCommerce product from search results on your site.
Let’s make sure it doesn’t show up in search anymore.
Step 5: Test Your New WooCommerce Search
To do that, go to your site and search for the product you’ve hidden from the search results. In our case, it’ll be a red beanie.
As you can see, there are no results for the “red beanie” search term.
It means that this hidden product doesn’t appear in search results on our test site anymore.
How to Hide WooCommerce Products By a Specific Category
You can also specify which WooCommerce categories you want to hide from search results.
Step 1: Install and Activate SearchWP
The first step is to install and activate SearchWP on your site.
Step 2: Install WooCommerce Integration Extension
Then, install and activate the SearchWP WooCommerce Integration extension.
Step 3: Choose the Product Category You Want to Hide
After you’ve activated the plugin and extension on your site, you’re ready to start customizing your search engine to hide a specific product category from search.
To get started, click SearchWP on the left panel of your WordPress dashboard.
After that, you’ll get to the Engines tab in SearchWP settings. On this tab, you can manage your search engines created with SearchWP.
A search engine contains rules that WordPress follows when performing searches on your site. You can edit these rules to customize the search behavior on your site to meet your business needs.
For example, you can manage search sources, adjust the relevance weight of attributes, limit search to a specific type of content, and many more.
To exclude a specific WooCommerce category from search results, you first need to add WooCommerce products as a search source to your search engine.
To get started, click Sources & Settings under the Default search engine section.
Then, make active the checkbox next to the Products search source.
When you’re finished, click Done to save the changes.
The next step is to add a rule for WordPress not to display a specific product category in search.
To do that, click Edit Rules under the Products search source section.
Then, click Add Rule.
Once you get to the rules editor, click on Only show entities if: item and change it to Exclude entries if:.
Next, click on the Product type field and change it to Product categories.
After that, enter the name of a WooCommerce product category you want to exclude from the search in the rightmost field.
For example, we’ll enter “Accessories”.
When you’ve finished managing categories you prefer not to appear in search results on your site, press Done to save your new rules.
The final step is to save all the changes you’ve made to your search engine. To do that, click the Save Engines button in the upper right corner.
After that, click the Rebuild Index button to make WordPress reindex your products and apply the new search rules.
The last thing you need to do is check your new search and make sure that your WooCommerce category is no longer showing up in the search.
Step 4: Test Your New WooCommerce Search
To do that, go to your site and search for some products from this category.
For example, we’ll search for the “fancy sunglasses” product, which is placed in the “Accessories” category on our test site.
As you can see, there are no search results for this search query.
Let’s also try to search for another product called ”golden earrings“ placed in the same category.
Again, no results. It means that we successfully excluded all products from this category from search results on our site.
From this guide, you learned how to hide WooCommerce products from search results in a few easy steps.
It’ll help you deliver more accurate search results to your customers, improve the quality of your search, and increase your sales.
Ready to boost your WooCommerce search and grow your business? You can get started with SearchWP here.
Want to add a live Ajax search to your WooCommerce store? Follow our detailed guide on how to add Ajax search to WooCommerce in a few simple steps.
Looking for a way to make WooCommerce product tags searchable on your site? Check out our how to search by product tags in WooCommerce tutorial.
