At times, your WooCommerce store might get cluttered with products that are no longer available or out of stock.
As a result, when visitors search for a particular item, they might see products that shouldn’t appear in the search results.
So, 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It’ll help you clean up the search results on your site of outdated or redundant products and allow your customers to find what they’re looking for faster.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- Clean up your search result: Remove outdated or redundant products from the search results on your site to make it easier to navigate your store.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 50,000 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 by highlighting them in the search results on your site, so 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 by visiting the website and signing up for a new account.
Next, log in to your SearchWP dashboard and go to the Downloads tab.
Once there, you can press the Download SearchWP button. It’ll start downloading the SearchWP ZIP file to your computer.
When you’re finished downloading, you should also copy your SearchWP license key, as you’ll need this key to activate the plugin.
Next, you can 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 activation, the welcome screen will appear along with the setup wizard. Simply click the ‘Start Onboarding Wizard’ button and follow the onscreen instructions.
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, you can navigate to SearchWP » Extensions from 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.
Step 3: Install Exclude UI Extension
The next step is to install another extension called Exclude UI.
This extension adds the ‘Exclude from SearchWP’ checkbox to the WordPress content editor. By ticking this checkbox, you can hide any page from search with a single click.
To install the Exclude UI extension, you can head to SearchWP » Extensions from your WordPress dashboard, locate the extension, and click the Install button.
After installing the extensions, you’re ready to start hiding WooCommerce products from search results.
Step 4: Include Products as Search Source
Next, you will need to edit the search engine in SearchWP and include Products in the search process.
You can think of search engines as a set of rules that will be followed when performing a search. With SearchWP, you can add custom search engine, customize them, and link them to separate search forms.
To get started, you’ll need to visit the SearchWP » Algorithm page from your WordPress dashboard. From here, simply click the Sources & Settings button.
Next, you will see a new window with the default sources for the search engine.
Go ahead and select Products as a source and then click the ‘Done’ button.
Step 5: Choose the Product You Want to Hide
Next, you can navigate to Products from 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 6: 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
Another way you can remove your products from WooCommerce search is by specifying categories you want to hide.
With SearchWP, you can set up advanced rules to exclude categories from the search process.
Step 1: Include Products as a Source
To get started, you will need to go to the SearchWP » Algorithm page from your WordPress dashboard and customize the search engine.
So, go ahead and press the Sources & Settings button.
Next, you will see the default sources for the search engine.
Make sure to select Products as a source and then click Done.
Step 2: Choose the Product Category You Want to Hide
The next step is to add a rule for SearchWP to not display a specific product category in search.
To do that, click Edit Rules under the Products search source section.
You should now see a new window to add new rules. At first, there will be no rules.
So simply click Add Rule to continue.
Next, you will see the rules editor in SearchWP.
From here, 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.
When you’ve finished managing categories you prefer not to appear in search results on your site, press Done to save your new rules.
Step 3: Save Your Search Engine
The final step is to save all the changes you’ve made to your search engine.
To do that, click the Save button in the upper right corner.
After that, click the Rebuild Index button to make Search 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.
Hiding WooCommerce products will help you deliver more accurate search results to your customers, improve the quality of your search, and increase your sales.
We hope this article helped you learn how to hide WooCommerce products from search results in a few easy steps. You may also want to see our guides on how to add Ajax search to WooCommerce and how to search by product tags in WooCommerce.
Ready to boost your WooCommerce search and grow your business? You can get started with SearchWP here.
