SEO 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.

A Beginners Guide to WooCommerce SEO

Thrilling image of a skier leaping from a snowy cliff against a clear blue sky in Whistler, Canada.

If you’ve recently launched a WooCommerce store—or are thinking about starting one—you’re probably already aware of the importance of SEO. After all, what good is a beautiful online shop if no one can find it in the first place?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective and affordable ways to bring consistent, organic traffic to your WooCommerce site. It’s how you get your products in front of the right people—those who are already searching for what you offer.

The best part? With a bit of know-how and some time investment, you can manage many of the key SEO strategies yourself—no need for expensive consultants or complex tools. WooCommerce is already built with SEO-friendly foundations, so you’ve got a head start.

In this beginner’s guide to WooCommerce SEO, we’ll walk you through the essentials: from choosing the right keywords to optimizing product pages, metadata, and site speed. Let’s dive in and get your shop ranking higher on search engines like Google.

Should You Disable Blog Functionality for Non-Blogging WooCommerce Clients?

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a member posed an interesting question: should WooCommerce clients who don’t intend to use WordPress’s blogging functions disable them entirely to possibly improve website performance?

Many eCommerce clients prioritize product pages, checkout flows, and support features over blog content, leading to the question of whether maintaining unused blogging functions adds any unnecessary load to the site. Below, we explore options for managing blog functionality in WooCommerce sites and whether disabling it could provide any tangible benefits.

WooCommerce: Fix Google Search Console “No global identifier provided” Error

If you registered your WooCommerce website on Google Search Console for monitoring your SEO efforts and search appearance errors, you probably got this “No global identifier provided (e.g. gtin, brand)” email notification at some stage. I got it too.

Search Console optionally requests you set a unique product GTIN structured data for all your products – I believe in case you wish to sell on Google Shopping – and therefore sends you this error notification whenever a product is missing this.

You could use a WooCommerce GTIN plugin from the WP repo, yes. Or you could be smart, and programmatically set the GTIN to the same value of the product SKU, as long as all your products have a unique SKU value. Today, we will cover the latter. 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: Add a Third Description @ Single Product Page

There are times when the “long description” and the “short description” are not enough on the WooCommerce Single Product page. What if you need to add another HTML content section – say – at the very bottom of the page (and maybe, because of the longer page, add another add to cart button there as well)?

In this simple snippet, we will add another “WYSIWYG” text editor in the Edit Product page, and display the output at the bottom of the single product page. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: How to Make Your Store More Mobile-Friendly

In April 2015, Google released an algorithm update that favored mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile oriented search results. This algorithm was named “Mobilegeddon”, and it gave leverage to those sites that display perfectly on smartphones and other mobile devices.

Clearly, having a mobile-friendly website not only makes it easier to engage and convert mobile using customers, but also paves the way for better ranking and visibility on search engines.

While it is good practice to get a WooCommerce mobile app for your store, it is also important to optimize your website and make it more mobile-friendly.

We will first discover the benefits of making your website more mobile-friendly, and then learn the tips and tricks to optimize it for small devices.

WooCommerce: Override Product Category Page Title

This is an interesting WooCommerce customization – as you know WordPress menus and widgets read whatever product category name and display it in the frontend.

Let’s say your product category title is “Tables”. This will show up in the navigation menu if you have set it up that way, in te breadcrumbs if you have any, in the sidebar category widgets, and as a title on the single product category page.

This is great and all, but what if your product category name is “Red Round Tables By Whatever Brandname“? As you can imagine, displaying this in a sidebar or navigation menu may be a little too much, while it’s fine to use it as a H1 on the single product category page for SEO reasons and enhanced readability.

So, the question is – how do we define an “alternative” product category name, so that this can be used on the product category page as custom title, while using the default one for other smaller locations such as menus and widgets?

Well, this is how it’s done – enjoy!

WooCommerce: Top 8 SEO Plugins to Grow Your Traffic

Having an amazing website with top-notch content that ranks on the fifth page of search results is every website owner’s worst nightmare.

And the key to avoiding this is to optimize your website for search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help you rank higher in search results, gain more visibility, and improve the quality and quantity of traffic your website gets – all of which can help your bottom line.

But here’s the catch – SEO can often be complicated and confusing for website owners, especially if you don’t have prior knowledge or a strategy in place. Analyzing content for keywords, creating a site structure, tracking rankings, and most importantly, staying on top of search engine algorithms is not an easy feat.

The good news is there’s a wide range of WordPress SEO plugins that can simplify the job for you. With features like content analysis, keyword tracking, and SEO audits, these plugins can help you optimize every part of your website effortlessly so you can gain more visibility online.

Like with many plugin categories, if you go looking, you can get lost in a sea of SEO plugins because there are simply so many of them. But we’ve done the legwork for you and prepared a list of the eight best plugins to supercharge your website traffic.

Let’s dive in!

WordPress: Growing Your Plugin (Part 2: Integrations)

If you use the word “integration” or “compatibility” with a seasoned plugin developer, chances are you might make them flinch. You can’t blame them. More often than not, these terms bring to mind an inbox laden with emails asking for compatibility with one plugin or another, day in and day out.

But what’s the big deal?- you ask. You, the proud developer of a newly released plugin, would kill to have an inbox full of customers. You would gladly trade places.

Well, the fact of the matter is that the prospect of an integration can be daunting. It means a plugin developer may have to become familiarized with a codebase that falls far short of their own standards (we all know what open-source, at its worst, can lead to). After that, resolving the compatibility issue in question ranges from cakewalk to descent into the underworld. Usually, it’s somewhere in between. The last step, of course, is to get back to the customer in question. Imagine the battle-tested plugin developer’s remorse when, on occasion, they never hear so much as a peep from that customer again. Sure, the resolution to this issue may pay dividends in the long-run, but as the veteran developer knows full-well, there is no guarantee of that.

In a word, ensuring your plugin plays well with others is no joke. That’s why you don’t hear many old-timers advising folks to make integrations and compatibility a focus, or at least that’s my hypothesis. But regardless of whether my suspicion is true or not, the fact that this is a neglected growth lever is beyond dispute. You don’t need to take my word for it either. Just ask Chris Lema, who recently stated as much in one of his blogposts (which I briefly covered in WooWeekly).

The message is simple: it pays well to ensure your plugin plays well with others. Even if that sounds like bad poetry to you, it’s true.

WordPress: Growing Your Plugin (Part 1: Website + SEO)

If you build it, they may come – but not in as great a number as they would otherwise.

I have seen WordPress developers reach as many as 10,000 active installations without spending a single minute on dime marketing. However, on every occasion that I hear such a story, I pause to wonder: how big would this theme or plugin be if the developer behind it thought about distribution?

Maybe their product spawns a company and they become the next YITH or Yoast, toasting after a major acquisition not thought possible in their wildest dreams.

The first hurdle to overcome as a developer is the fallacy that your product is tainted by even the slightest speck of marketing, as if it was a glass of unadulterated, pure spring water sourced from the streams of Mount Olympus.

The WordPress ecosystem is not the plains of Dion – it’s more like the dregs of Romulus. More and more, it is guaranteed that you will face competition from the optimates, the big guys who come in the form of hosting providers, prolific WordPress development companies, super plugins, site builders, etc.

The best themes and plugins don’t always win in the face of superior brands and warchests. In fact, the more disillusioned among us would say that they rarely do these days.

The good news is that the best themes and plugins can win, even if their developers are unknown and resource-constrained. But it all begins by bringing the horse to water. After that, if the product is good enough, the horse will drink. If it does not drink, there is more development to do.

WooCommerce: How To Change The Permalink Structure

WooCommerce permalink structure may appear unusual for newcomers. Those /product/ and /product-category/ parts of the URL are well-known distinctive features, but some experts don’t agree that this is the most convenient way to handle permalinks SEO-wise.

A popular thought is to always keep URL structure as simple as possible and remove any unnecessary parts of it. You don’t have to take the word of those experts or me since the official guideline from Google suggest to avoid lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters.

So, what does that exactly mean for WooCommerce store builders?

First of all, URL bases like /shop/, /product-category/ and /product/ can be considered unnecessary as Google knows how to define shop and product pages without the need of specifying that inside the URL.

And probably you don’t want to create a false perception of site depth for crawlers so they don’t rate those pages lower than they should be. Again, a well-known precept – pages closer to the main folder (domain) are more meaningful for search engines.

If you agree with such statements, it would be helpful to understand how to redesign the permalink structure in WooCommerce. So read ahead to find out about that.

WooCommerce: Hide Product Price & Stock From Google

The WooCommerce Plugin is also developed with SEO in mind and provides your website with the schema markup for products (as well as other microdata useful for search engines).

This means by default your products are going to show on Google together with other data such as review stars, stock status, number of reviews and – you saw that coming – the product price.

In certain case scenario, however, you may want to hide WooCommerce product prices from Google search results (and all the other search engines of course). For example, because your prices are only visible to logged in users; or maybe because you don’t want to display your prices until potential customers go to your website and read all the product benefits as opposed to having them make a price-only decision.

Either way, let’s see how it’s done. And once again, it’s one line of code. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Second Description @ Product Category Pages

In terms of SEO, if you’re trying to rank your product category pages, you really need to make the most of the default WooCommerce product category “description” and “thumbnail”. Most themes, if compatible with WooCommerce, will show this content right below the product category name and above products.

Nothing new so far. But what if you want to add another piece of content below the category products while also keeping the default description? Well, we’d need to customize the edit category page and display a new text editor field, save it, and finally display it where we want. So, here’s how they do it!

Tag: SEO