“32% of e-commerce sites still don’t have any kind of category pages. During testing, sites without intermediary category pages suffered greatly as many subjects made wrong selections or were unable to define an appropriate scope, leaving them with very broad categories, and often thousands of products to consider.”

Making your category page look better and more sophisticated will result in higher revenues, more website traffic, and improved SEO. 

What customizations can you add to these pages? Well, here’s a short checklist:

• Add large and bold images highlighting the details of your products 
• Add catchy copywriting to the product descriptions 
• Make use of plugins to give your categories the extra flair they need

So without further ado, let’s see how you can customize your WooCommerce category page! 👇

How to Edit and Customize Your Category Page – Step by Step

Add Larger Product Images

No matter where they appear, teeny-weeny advertising pictures are controversial. It’s a concern if your customers have to squint to see the detail in your thumbnails. On laptops with retina screens, big smartphones, or widescreen monitors, tiny thumbnails or sample images are a hassle. The solution is to enlarge the photos and show more clarity. 

Here’s a pretty good example of how to include large and bold product images:

Patagonia is a well-known online store that focuses on providing an accurate and almost touchable point of view to the customer. By implementing large images like such, customers can grasp their product looks like.

This is how you add bold images using WooCommerce: 
First, go to your WordPress Dashboard → Products → Categories, and then hit ‘Upload/Add image”.

Once you click on ‘Add an image,’ your Gallery will pop up from where you can choose your desired image.

After adding the image, it’s time to set its size according to your needs. 
For this, go to Appearance → Customize → Woocommerce → Product Images.

From here, you can set the featured image’s size to appear the way you want it.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Good Copywriting

You’ve probably had some experience with copywriting for your product pages and homepage, but your use of it outside of those areas might be minimal. So, you might want to get your creative writing skills ready because you’ll need them.

On the category pages, copywriting has its perks. It informs shoppers what each category contains, makes the page appear less bare, and provides essential background clues to search engines.

Here’s another example from Patagonia and their simple yet straightforward and catchy copywriting:

Remember that a single copy page won’t help or hinder your SEO — it’ll only add a little more meaning overall, so it’s not something you should be too concerned with. 

This is how you add product copy in WooCommerce: 

From your Dashboard, go to Products → Add New, and you’ll see a section where you can include an accurate product description.

If you’d like to edit an already existing product, head over to Products → All Products and hit the small ‘Edit’ icon under the product. Like this: 👇

The same white space will appear in which you can type in the desired description. 

Below you’ll see another excellent example of copywriting done well by a famous clothing and surfwear company whose primary goal is to keep our oceans clean and provide high quality and sustainable products.

A Little Something to Help you Create Custom Category Pages

Developing your own custom WooCommerce category page layout doesn’t have to be challenging at all. With the appropriate plugin, you will be able to create precisely what you have in mind without having to spend countless hours working on it. 
I will give you insight into using the WooCommerce Product Table Lite plugin, which will completely control how information is shown and how customers approach your goods.

This plugin displays your WooCommerce products in a customizable table layout, with the ability to add filters, search boxes, scrollbars, and much more.

You could also use the plugin to restrict the display of products to different categories or subcategories. For accomplishing the above, WooCommerce Product Table offers two options: 

• The product table layout can be enabled centrally on all product category pages. This is ideal if you want to personalize all of your product category pages.

• You can also manually create your WooCommerce category pages by using a shortcode. For example, if you only want to list products from specific categories in the table.

We’ll show you how to configure the WooCommerce Product Table to accomplish both possibilities down below.

Personalize Category Pages in WooCommerce Using Product Tables

You’ll want to configure the WooCommerce Product Table plugin’s default settings after you’ve installed and activated it. To begin, navigate to WooCommerce → Settings →  Products →  Product Tables. 

First, go to the Add a New Product Table and look for the Columns setting. This is where you will have control over what information appears in your table. For example, you can display product attributes, custom fields, and other information in addition to core product information.

From this section, you have two options: one with adding additional information about products, the other with adding product images. If you hit Add a Column, I’ll present the screenshot below from which you can choose to select whatever you’d like.

If you’d like to make adjustments to the product text, then this is where you need to go for this window to pop up: 👇

If you hit Product Image, the same thing happens: 👇

Furthermore, you have the option to adjust your Query elements, such as product quantity, product category, SKUs, product IDs, and much more: 👇

Then, if you go to Navigation, you’ll be able to add navigation buttons to your category page, just like this: 👇

Create your own WooCommerce category page design with a Shortcode

First off, what’s a shortcode?

A shortcode is a tiny snippet of code that adds a unique function to a WordPress site. Because most shortcodes are not included in WordPress themes or plugins, they can be integrated into pages, posts, and text widgets wherever a user wants to add that feature – or erased when the feature is no longer required.

To begin, go to Pages → Add New and create a basic WordPress page. Then, on the page, insert the [product table] shortcode. You can also use the regular title field to add a category title.

The shortcode will showcase all of your WooCommerce products by default. However, if you feel like you need more information about WooCommerce shortcodes, here’s an article specifically about this topic, answering all questions you might have. 

One final suggestion. Remember to cater to customers who may accidentally click on the wrong link or end up in the wrong location. It’s essential to make your category pages good-looking and functional and easy to use. Consider your users’ experience right off the bat rather than the page’s appearance.

Use Page Builders

In WooCommerce, the appearance of product category pages is controlled by a template on the theme you use. If you are not a fan of the default appearance of the product category pages available with your theme, you can create a custom template to replace it. This is usually done with page builders such as Elementor, Divi, etc.

Let’s take Divi for example.

Divi is one of the most popular WordPress themes, and for a good reason. It has a lot of functionality and is compatible with WooCommerce, perfect for customizing category pages.

This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to customize the category page template. In this manner, you may design a category page template that you can use for all of your WooCommerce store’s category pages.

To begin using Divi, you must first install and activate it. After that, you can download the Divi zip file from their official website. Then navigate to Appearance –> Themes –> Add New on your WordPress dashboard.

To upload the Divi.zip file to your site, go to Upload Theme and select the file you just downloaded. When it’s finished uploading, click Install Now to install the theme and activate it once it’s finished. The Divi builder, the in-built page builder that we’ll use to customize the category pages, will be installed when you activate the Divi theme. And, you’re done!

Over to You

Category pages are essential – make them stand out!

There are nearly limitless ways to improve the effectiveness of an online store. For example, you may not have expected that optimizing your category pages could make a significant difference. Still, these pages are just as important as any other component of your store.

You’ll be ready to take these boring pages to the next level by adding some copy, ramping up the size of your photos, or attaching some well-placed links or information. Feel free to experiment with one or two of these strategies and see what happens!