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.

PHP Snippet: Redirect Empty, Paginated, Category Pages to Main WooCommerce Product Category Page

This snippet hooks into the template_redirect action to catch 404 pages that resemble paginated product category URLs.

It first retrieves the WooCommerce product category base slug from the permalink settings, making it compatible with custom or translated slugs.

Then, it checks if the current request matches the pattern of a paginated category page. If so, it extracts the category slug from the URL, confirms the category exists, and safely redirects the user to the main category page.

This prevents visitors and search engines from encountering empty or broken paginated URLs after products have been removed from that category.

/**
 * @snippet       Redirect Empty Paginated WooCommerce Category Pages
 * @tutorial      https://businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-customization
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli, Business Bloomer
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 9
 * @community     https://businessbloomer.com/club/
 */

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'bbloomer_redirect_empty_product_cat_pagination' );

function bbloomer_redirect_empty_product_cat_pagination() {
	if ( is_404() ) {
		$requested_url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
		$permalinks = wc_get_permalink_structure();		
		if ( preg_match( '#^/' . $permalinks['category_rewrite_slug'] . '/[^/]+/page/\d+/?#', $requested_url ) ) {
			preg_match( '#/' . $permalinks['category_rewrite_slug'] . '/([^/]+)/#', $requested_url, $matches );
			if ( isset( $matches[1] ) ) {
				$term = get_term_by( 'slug', $matches[1], 'product_cat' );
				if ( $term && ! is_wp_error( $term ) ) {
					wp_safe_redirect( get_term_link( $term ) );
					exit;
				}
			}
		}
	}
}