An Exclusive Guide for WooCommerce Product Filter Plugin

An average WooCommerce store can carry hundreds of inventory items and product variants. As a store owner, you might believe in offering the most to the visitors so that they find at least one (or more) items of interest and complete the transaction successfully.

However, think of it from the visitor’s perspective: who has time to browse through the long listings to find out the product they are looking for. For many visitors, it quicker to switch to another store rather than wading through a seemingly endless list of product variants.

This is where a simple WooCommerce product filter plugin adds great value to the overall user experience and allows the users to see a much shorter product listing.

Why we Use WooCommerce Product Filter

Let me illustrate the role of WooCommerce filter through an example:

A typical activewear store can have about 30 tank top variants in the inventory.  Now when a visitor enters the phrase “tank top” in the store’s search bar, the results page will list all 30 variants. Now at this point, the visitor has to go through the entire list to find a tank top that fits their requirements.

Now imagine that the store offers a way to filter down the tank tops that do not match the user requirements. This will reduce the number of results that the user has to look through. As a result, the chances that the visitor would finalize a purchase significantly increases.

Product filters are an important part of your store’s user experience. Without a product filtering option, your customers will only see a long list of products. This is enough to turn off many visitors. On the other side, if your store offers good product filtering, the visitors can have a great experience at your store and might return for another purchase.

Another important benefit of product filers is product discovery. Visitors might see something similar to what they are interested in right now. This is another great way of increasing sales and revenue.

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WooCommerce Product Filter Plugins

Like everything else, you have the choice of several WooCommerce product filter plugins that you can integrate within your store. While some plugins are paid and some free, the choice of the plugin really depends upon your particular requirements and of course budget.

To help you save time and headache, I have compiled a list of free and paid WooCommerce product filter plugins that you can use in your store and offer a great experience to your visitors.

• JetSmartFilters by Crocoblock (Paid)
• WOOF – Products Filter for WooCommerce (Free)
• Advanced AJAX Product Filters (Free)
• Ultimate WooCommerce Filters (Freemium)
• Themify – WooCommerce Product Filter (Free)
• YITH WooCommerce Product Filter (Freemium)
• Product Filters for WooCommerce (Paid)

JetSmartFilters by Crocoblock

An AJAX-Based system, a variety of widgets for filtering and pagination, a number of filter bar designs – it is all about JetSmartFilters plugin. It is possible to apply several filter types and hide undesired searching results at the same time.  In this way, website visitors can find the needed products in a few clicks.

JetSmartFilters is a handy addition to one more Crocoblock plugin – JetWooBuilderThis is a multifunctional tool for e-commerce website creators which provides various options to showcase the products starting from creating catchy badges and customer reviews up to categorizing products and adding them into attractive grids.

Features:

• 9 filter widgets
• Highly customizable
• Compatible with any WordPress Theme
• Advanced filtering techniques

WOOF – Products Filter for WooCommerce

WOOF is perhaps the highest rated free WooCommerce product filter plugin that allows the visitors to search the products by categories, attributes, tags, custom taxonomies, and price.

This plugin has 70,000+ active installations.

Features

• Shortcode and widget options available
• This plugin uses the native WooCommerce API only
• Compatible with WooCommerce Currency Switcher
• Compatible with WooCommerce Products Per Page
• Visitors can filter the products by Taxonomies

Advanced AJAX Product Filters

Advanced AJAX product filters plugin allows you to add unlimited filters to your widget. It is a free plugin and easy to use with a lot of good features. Visitors can easily filter the products by attributes, custom taxonomies, price, tags and categories.

This plugin has 10,000+ active installations.

Features

• Very SEO friendly
• Easy filters
• Custom CSS can be added through the admin page
• Filter by product tags
• Option to manually set values for the Price Slider

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Ultimate WooCommerce Filters

This plugin allows you to implement product filters with a simple WooCommerce widget and shortcodes. It is very easy to use and simplifies the visitors’ experience of dealing with a large inventory. This plugin has 3,000+ active installations.

Features

• Visitors can filter products by WooCommerce categories and tags
• Fully compatible with WPML

Themify – WooCommerce Product Filter

This is a flexible tool for setting up product filter options within your WooCommerce store. This free WordPress plugin allows visitors to easily filter through products by price range, tags, attributes, categories, and many more. This is an awesome tool that helps shoppers find any products fast and easy!

This plugin has 10,000+ active installations.

Features

• Live search results
• Drag-and-drop option form builder
• Multiple filter combinations
• Set vertical or horizontal layouts for your WooCommerce store

YITH WooCommerce Product Filter

Yith WooCommerce product filter is a freemium plugin which comes with several popular features. This plugin allows visitors to filter store inventory by using price, color, category, tags, etc.

This plugin has 1,00,000+ active installations.

Features

• Filter WooCommerce products with four widgets including List, Dropdown, Color, and Label
• Easy widget reset
• 100% compatible with the YITH WooCommerce Brands plugin
• Customization of the WooCommerce Price Filter widget

Product Filters for WooCommerce

Product filters for WooCommerce is a paid plugin which your store visitors can use to filter products by categories, attributes, tags, taxonomies, price, stock status.

Features

• Simple and easy-to-use for store visitors
• 24/7 support
• Adaptive product thumbnails
• Shortcode based integration

Plugin Integration

Although there are many plugins that add WooCommerce product filter capability to your store, the choice is ultimately yours. However, all plugins share a very similar installation process. For the purpose of this tutorial, I will use Themify – WooCommerce Product Filter.

Step 1: Install the WooCommerce Product Filter Plugin

If you are a WordPress user, this is the easy part and you are already this. However, if you are not that proficient, here’s a list of instructions:

• Make sure you have the WooCommerce plugin installed and activated. For Woocommerce installation, you can refer to our post on how to install and set up a WooCommerce store.
• Login to your WordPress admin dashboard.
• Navigate Plugins → Add New and search “Themify – WooCommerce Product Filter.”
• Click on the “Install Now” button.
• After successful installation, click “Activate Plugin” button to get started.

Step 2: Getting Started With Product Filter Plugin

Before using this plugin, you need to have a few products with categories, tags, price, and attributes. You can read our beginner’s guide to WooCommerce product tags, categories, and attributes.

Step 3: Utilize the WooCommerce Product Filter Plugin

After successfully downloading and activating this plugin, you’ll see a Product Filters option in the side panel where you can create your filter templates.

Note that all filter options will be connected to product tags, categories, prices, and attributes. After making the filter template, you can copy and paste the required shortcode(s) anywhere you want on the pages and posts.

Step 4: Create a New Product Filter

To add new product filters, you need to go to the admin dashboard side panel and then navigate to Product Filters → Add New. A popup will appear where you can see and manage all the parameters of your product filters.

You will see the following options:

• Form Title: Enter a title.
• Layout: You have two options: Horizontal and Vertical.
• Product Sorting: Show or hide the capacity to sort the products. This is a drop-down option that’ll show up in the top-right corner.
• Product Count: This option shows or hides the number of results on the product search listing.
• Pagination: Show or hide pagination on the filtered product listing.
• Product Per Page: Set the maximum number of products that will appear for a search result.
• Toggle Field Groups: Set up field groups toggle.
• Scroll To Result: Set up scroll to result.
• Result Page Template: Show on the same or a different page.

You can drag and drop the following modules on your template builder where you should position the modules the way you wish.

• Category: Show product categories.
• In Stock: Display the in-stock products.
• On Sale: Show sales and/or product discounts.
• Price: Display the Price Slider.
• Product Title: Display the title of the product.
• SKU: Display product SKU.
• Tags: Display product tags (if any).
• Submit Button: When added to the form, the button disables the live search results. It will display the search results based on what you’ve chosen on the “Result Page Template” option.

To demonstrate the form building capability, I have dragged category and price to the form.

After clicking the Save button, a shortcode will appear. Copy the shortcode and paste it into any text editor.

After adding this shortcode, something similar to the following image will appear:

You can also add filtration on the sidebar through a widget. For this, check out the next step.

Step 5: Display Widget Sidebar Filter

To display the Product Filter in a sidebar, you need to go to the admin dashboard side panel and navigate to Appearance → Widget. Drag and drop a WooCommerce widget in the sidebar drop-down option. This will appear on all pages and posts where you have the sidebar is visible.

Here you go! The result will appear in the sidebar as seen in the image below:

Step 6: Reinstall Plugin

Sometimes the auto plugins update does not work. If this is the case with you, simply try to reinstall the plugin. Generally, this doesn’t affect the content/data because they are saved separately in the database. If you are opting for a reinstall, remember to backup WordPress site content (posts, pages, menus, etc.) before reinstalling.

Go to WP admin → Tools → Export and export all contents to a zip file. You may use WP Admin → Tools → Import to import the backup (if the need arises).

Final Words!

That’s all there is to it. If your store is powered by WooCommerce, you should add a product filter plugin to your store and start multiplying your sales. I hope you encounter no issues while using WooCommerce Product Filter plugin and that this tutorial has proved to be of help. If you have any queries or suggestions about this tutorial, you can leave a comment below!