How to Find a WooCommerce Product Category Page Template
If you decide to edit WooCommerce product category or product tag pages, the first question that may come to your mind is about the template used for these pages in WooCommerce.
However, everything is not so straightforward here. In this tutorial, I will uncover everything for you step by step – for both classic and block themes.
Product Category Page Template in Block Themes
If you’re using a WordPress block theme for your WooCommerce store, everything should be pretty clear for you. However, I think it would be great to mention it in this tutorial as well.
So, for block themes you just need to go to Appearance > Editor, then to Templates, and find a template named Products by Category. That’s pretty much it.
Product Category Page Template File (PHP) in Classic Themes
As you know, WooCommerce product categories are just a product_cat taxonomy, right? So, according to that and to the WordPress template hierarchy, the taxonomy-product_cat.php file should be in use? Or at least archive.php.
No!
First of all, let me explain why. WooCommerce is intended to work on any WordPress theme, so, when you install and activate it, the plugin can not just go ahead and create one more file – taxonomy-product_cat.php in your theme directory, that would be weird, right?
So, most of the WooCommerce system pages operate from the standard WordPress pages.
In the latest version of WooCommerce, there are no template files in your theme that are connected in some way to WooCommerce product category pages, which means that it is time for us to look into the woocommerce/templates folder.
A template hierarchy diagram for WooCommerce product category page template files:
templates folder to your theme woocommerce folder.This is how it works:
- If you have a
taxonomy-product-cat.phpfile in your theme, in thewoocommercefolder, it will be used first. It is convenient if you need a design for category pages to be different from other product archive pages. - Otherwise, if you have the
archive-product.phpfile instead, it will be used for product categories, product tags, and product attributes.
If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below.
Misha Rudrastyh
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I am trying to have a different template for a specific product category with the slug of ‘courses’. I have tried naming it
taxonomy-product-cat-courses.phpand placing it in thewoocommercefolder of my theme, right next totaxonomy-product-cat.phpbut WC won’t pick it up. It keeps usingtaxonomy-product-cat.php. Am I using the wron approach? Thanks in advanceYes, correct, WooCommerce doesn’t support templates in this format
taxonomy-product-cat-{slug}.php. You need to do the stuff insidetaxonomy-product-cat.phpfile here.