Redirect Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: Redirect Empty Paginated Category Pages (404)

When managing a WooCommerce store, it’s common to rearrange products or remove them from certain categories. However, this can lead to an unexpected issue: paginated product category URLs (e.g., /product-category/shirts/page/3/) may still be accessible even when that specific page no longer contains any products.

Instead of displaying a 404 error, it’s often better to redirect users back to the main category page to avoid confusion and improve user experience.

This is especially important for SEO, as you don’t want search engines indexing irrelevant or broken pages. The solution is to detect when a paginated product category archive is empty or invalid and redirect to the base category URL instead.

Below is a simple snippet you can add to your theme’s functions.php or a custom plugin. It handles the redirect only when necessary, ensuring users and bots land on meaningful content.

Should You Redirect Your WooCommerce Shop Page to Your Only Product Category?

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a WooCommerce store owner raised an interesting question about managing duplicate content on their site. The store features multiple product categories, but the main Shop page only showcases one category.

This creates a situation where both the “Shop” and “Product Category” pages display identical content, potentially impacting SEO by creating duplicate content.

The store owner is considering redirecting the Shop page to the specific Product Category page and indexing only that page.

Let’s explore the pros and cons of this approach and provide some practical recommendations for optimizing the Shop page while maintaining the best SEO practices.

Custom WooCommerce Product URL Redirect for Better URL Structure

In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a WooCommerce user shared a challenge with their product URL structure. The site currently uses URLs in the format website.com/product-name, but they wanted to revert to WooCommerce’s default URL format: website.com/product/product-name.

With over 900 products, manually creating redirects would be overwhelming, and they needed a solution that wouldn’t impact performance or SEO. The user also wanted to know if a snippet or .htaccess method could handle this redirect, while keeping the process efficient and clean.

To make this transition easier, a PHP snippet in WordPress can help handle the redirects automatically, avoiding .htaccess changes. Here’s how you can set it up so that product pages will redirect to the new URL structure with minimal hassle.

WooCommerce: Remove “add-to-cart=123” URL Parameter After Add to Cart

The “add-to-cart” parameter in WooCommerce is used to create a custom URL that adds a specific product to the shopping cart. The “123” value is the product ID, and you can even specify a custom quantity. By clicking a link with this parameter in the URL, the user can add the specified product (ID# 123 in this example) to their cart without having to navigate to the product page itself.

The problem is that WooCommerce itself doesn’t automatically remove the “add-to-cart” parameter after a successful add to cart, and if you reload the page you will add to cart again! So, let’s see how we can remove this parameter in case you disabled the “redirect to cart” option.

WooCommerce: Empty Cart Redirect

An empty WooCommerce Cart page can be frustrating for customers, especially if they’ve been browsing and adding items to their cart.

Redirecting them to a relevant page, like the Shop page, can help them continue shopping and potentially complete a purchase.

The redirect page can be used to showcase ongoing sales, promotions, or new products that customers might be interested in. This can help generate interest and encourage customers to make a purchase.

So, let’s see how we can redirect users from the empty Cart page to another page on the same website. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Redirect URL With SKU To Single Product Page

Let’s say your WooCommerce product has the following permalink: example.com/shop/t-shirts-tops-and-blouses/t-shirt-casual-v-neck-longsleeve-green-medium-cotton-stretch

Wouldn’t it be shorter, more fun and neater if you could also reach the same exact single product page by using example.com/sku00001 in the browser bar, where “sku00001” is the product SKU?

Well, in today’s snippet we will create a simple redirect from a custom URL that contains the product SKU to the product page, so that you can use the URL “shortener“ in your email marketing, display advertising, blog posts and anywhere you want to show a “pretty link” instead of a full, long, boring product page URL.

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Custom Logout Redirect @ My Account

Whenever a customer logs out from WooCommerce, they are redirected to the My Account page URL.

But when you use separate Login and Registration pages, or whenever you have custom landing pages you wish your customers to see instead of the default My Account page, we can set a custom URL by code and safely redirect the just-logged-out customer there. Here’s the quick fix – enjoy!

WooCommerce: Redirect Product Category Pages

Maybe because you have only one product category and therefore search engines would find duplicate content (Shop page = Category page) and penalize your website.

Or maybe because you use advanced product filters and you prefer customers to see the filtered view “by category” (e.g. “example.com/shop/?_product_category=tables“) as opposed to the default category pages ( “example.com/product_category/tables” ).

Either way, it is possible to programmatically redirect all product category pages to a given page or to a relevant URL with parameters – and here’s the fix. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Custom Registration Redirect @ My Account

The WooCommerce My Account register form (when enabled) redirects to… itself once a WooCommerce customer registers. So, what if you want to redirect newly registered users to another page?

Also, when you have a custom Registration page, you may need to redirect users to the… My Account page!

Either way, here’s how to change the default redirect behavior. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Custom Login Redirect @ My Account

The WooCommerce My Account login form redirects to… itself once a WordPress user logs in. So, what if you want to redirect logged in users to another page or a different My Account endpoint?

Also, when you have a custom Login page, you may need to redirect users to the… My Account page!

Either way, here’s how to change the default redirect behavior. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Disable Single Search Result Redirect

You have a WooCommerce product called “VREIUTERTKXYU“. You search for “VREIUTERTKXYU” (exact match). WooCommerce, by default, redirects you to the single product page as there is only 1 possible search result (as opposed to sending you to the search result page).

In today’s tutorial, we will be deactivating this WooCommerce function and go back to the normal (at least, to me) behavior: even if there is an exact match in a search (single search result), we still want to display the search page.

The screenshot that follows gives you a working proof, once the snippet you find below is active. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Redirect My Account Tab to URL

It’s nice to know the stuff I share here is used on my own website! In this case scenario, I have a custom “My Courses” tab under the My Account navigation menu; instead of showing the My Account tab content with a link, I want to save time and immediately redirect users to https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-online-courses/ instead.

So, how do you redirect My Account tabs to custom URLs? Well, thankfully it’s just a matter of a few lines of code. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Login Redirect to Previous URL @ My Account

We’ve already seen how to set a custom My Account login redirect URL by user role – but today we want to cover another case scenario: redirecting users to the previous URL (referrer) after logging in from the My Account page.

Actually, WooCommerce already prints a hidden input field (“_wp_http_referer“) in the login form thanks to wp_nonce_field(), but for some reason this is not enough to allow the actual redirect.

Thankfully, the WooCommerce process_login() function provides another workaround: if $_POST[‘redirect’] is set, the form will consider redirecting to this URL instead of the default My Account Dashboard! This means we can simply add a new hidden field to the login form with that exact name (“redirect”), so that we can make that function trigger the redirect we want.

Easier coded than said, so let’s see how it’s done. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Login Redirect by User Role @ My Account

There are times when you don’t want customers to login and be redirected to the default “My Account” dashboard. Maybe because you have a membership site and you want them to go to a custom “Welcome” page, or maybe you wish to send them straight to their “My Account” > “Downloads” subsection.

No matter the why, for sure figuring out how to achieve a custom redirect once a user logs in from the “My Account” page is quite straightforward. The hook we’ll use is called “woocommerce_login_redirect” and allows us to trigger a safe redirect whenever a customer clicks on the LOGIN button. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Single Product Page Redirect for Logged In Customers

If you sell one-off products like online courses, lifetime memberships or unique pieces that can only be purchased once by a given customer, maybe you’d better redirecting the logged in customer who has purchased that product to a custom URL, such as the shop page, the “my courses” page for online courses or another customer-specific section.

With this easy snippet you’ll learn how to see if a user is logged in and has purchased a given product ID and then how to do a safe PHP redirect. Enjoy!

Tag: Redirect