WooCommerce: Disable Related Products Shuffle

By default, the WooCommerce Single Product page features a Related Product section. Here, you’ll find products that are related to the current product, based on product categories and product tags in common.

All good so far, but we need to make a few more notes: whenever WooCommerce “calculates” the list of Related Products, it searches for 15 of them (unless otherwise specified via custom code). Then, it shuffles them. And finally it gives you the first 5 of them (unless otherwise specified via custom code). At this stage, these are sorted by “rand” (unless otherwise specified via custom code).

This is because WooCommerce wants people to see different related products each time a single product page is loaded. It’s potentially good, but also it may get messy when, as a store owner, you may want to direct people to the same related products over and over again (i.e. always show the same set of related products).

And in order to do that, we need to do 2 changes: disable the shuffle, and disable the “rand” sorting. In this way, you should be able to show the same Related Products to all customers. Let’s see how this is done!

PHP Snippet: Always Return The Same Set of Related Products @ WooCommerce Single Product Page

You should use both snippets: the first disables the shuffle of the 15 calculated related products. In this way, when WooCommerce gets the first 5 related products out of these 15, they will always be the same. The second snippet sorts these 5 not by random, so the result is always the same.

/**
 * @snippet       Disable Related Products Shuffle
 * @how-to        businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-customization
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli, Business Bloomer
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 7
 * @community     https://businessbloomer.com/club/
 */

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_related_posts_shuffle', '__return_false' );

/**
 * @snippet       Sort Related Products By Anything
 * @how-to        businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-customization
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli, Business Bloomer
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 7
 * @community     https://businessbloomer.com/club/
 */

add_filter( 'woocommerce_output_related_products_args', 'bbloomer_sort_related_products' );

function bbloomer_sort_related_products( $args ) {
	$args['orderby'] = 'id';
	return $args;
}

// alternatively, use 'title', 'date', 'modified', 'menu_order' or 'price', see wc_products_array_orderby()