WooCommerce: Hide “Private” Products From The Shop Page

WooCommerce admins and store managers can set the product visibility to “Private“. This is helpful if they need to hide certain products from the public, while keeping them available for manual invoicing or other purposes.

The problem, however, is that if admins or store managers are logged in, private WooCommerce products (as well as private WordPress posts, private WordPress pages, etc.) are actually visible on the Shop, Category and product loop pages.

The “Private: ” prefix is added to the product title (see screenshot), but there is usually no need to alter the frontend with products that are not going to be added to the cart anyway!

So, let’s hide private products for WooCommerce administrators from the frontend. Enjoy!

Table Of Contents

1. PHP Snippet: Remove Private Products From Shop, Category, Product Loop Pages
2. Advanced Plugin: WooCommerce Protected Categories

PHP Snippet: Remove Private Products From Shop, Category, Product Loop Pages

Note: this code also hides private WordPress posts, pages, and custom post type posts.

/**
 * @snippet       Hide Private Products @ WooCommerce Frontend
 * @how-to        Get CustomizeWoo.com FREE
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 8
 * @community     https://businessbloomer.com/club/
 */

add_filter( 'posts_where', 'bbloomer_no_private_products_posts_frontend_administrator' );

function bbloomer_no_private_products_posts_frontend_administrator( $where ) {
    if ( is_admin() ) return $where;
    global $wpdb;
    return " $where AND {$wpdb->posts}.post_status != 'private' ";
}

Advanced Plugin: WooCommerce Protected Categories

The code snippet above is very specific and hides private products from the shop and archive pages for administrators. For more control over product visibility, I recommend the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin.

This robust plugin from Barn2 works by letting you control who can see the products in each category on your site. You can choose between basic password protection or restrict categories to certain roles or even individual users. This gives you fine-grained control and is a useful no-code solution for showing different products to different types of user.

Where to add custom code?

You should place custom PHP in functions.php and custom CSS in style.css of your child theme: where to place WooCommerce customization?

This code still works, unless you report otherwise. To exclude conflicts, temporarily switch to the Storefront theme, disable all plugins except WooCommerce, and test the snippet again: WooCommerce troubleshooting 101

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Rodolfo Melogli

Business Bloomer Founder

Author, WooCommerce expert and WordCamp speaker, Rodolfo has worked as an independent WooCommerce freelancer since 2011. His goal is to help entrepreneurs and developers overcome their WooCommerce nightmares. Rodolfo loves travelling, chasing tennis & soccer balls and, of course, wood fired oven pizza. Follow @rmelogli