How to Add a Product Filter To Your WooCommerce Elementor Store

Do you want to help your customers find the products they are looking for as easily as possible? If yes, you should consider adding a product filter to your WooCommerce store.

Adding a product filter plays a vital role in improving the overall user experience at your store. Filters help your customers to narrow down your product catalog by taxonomies like price, categories, tags, ratings, and more, and find the products they are looking for quickly.

In this post, we’ll go into detail about why you should add product filters to your WooCommerce store, then show you how to go about it using the popular Elementor page builder.

What is a Product Filter and Why Do You Need One?

Every eCommerce store requires a means of filtering and searching the product catalog. Without effective search and filter functionality, customers will be forced to navigate multiple product pages to find their desired product.

This slows down the purchase journey for your customers, leading to a worse customer experience, which in turn can contribute to reduced conversions for your store.

For this reason and more, offering a filtering option on your online store is a must. Among other benefits, adding a product filter to your WooCommerce store makes it much easier for your customers to find their desired products, which contributes to an overall better shopping experience.

Let’s take a look in more detail at some of the key benefits that adding a product filter to your WooCommerce store can bring.

Key Benefits of a Product Filter

Easier Navigation

As a store owner, you want all your visitors to be able to browse your store easily and find the products they want quickly. Product filters make the navigation of your online store easy and simple. All your customers have to do is apply filters for the different taxonomies they are interested in (for example, specific product categories, price ranges, or attributes), and all the products that don’t match their filter requirements will be filtered out.

For example, if a customer visited your online store with a budget of $30 to spend, they could apply a price range filter to your product catalog to filter out any products that cost more than $30. This would help them to find products within their budget more quickly, making for a more streamlined shopping experience.

Enhances Product Visibility

Product filters not only help customers to find the products that they are looking for; they can also help store owners improve product visibility. Using the right product filter plugin, store owners can add new custom filter types to their WooCommerce store to boost the visibility of newer or less popular products.

For example, by adding a product category or custom taxonomy for “New” or “Featured” products and enabling your customers to filter by this taxonomy, you can increase the visibility of specific products, rather than them simply being lost within your product list.

This is a great way to boost sales on products that are performing less well than you would like, or advertise new or high-value products to your customers.

Improves Shopping Experience

For any eCommerce store owner, providing a great user experience is a priority. If your store isn’t user-friendly, customers are more likely to look elsewhere, and you might lose out on their business forever, as 88% of customers are unlikely to return to a site after a bad experience.

By using product filters on your WooCommerce store, you provide your customers with a quicker way to find the products that they are looking for. This will enhance their shopping experience, increasing the chance that they will return to your store to place additional orders.

Streamlines the Customer Journey

As we’ve mentioned, creating a better shopping experience by making it quicker and easier for customers to find the products they are looking for is a good way to boost your conversions and reduce site dropoff.

Product filters streamline the customer journey from landing on your site to making a purchase by reducing the number of touchpoints required to buy the products they are looking for. Using product filters, customers can find relevant products in a matter of seconds, removing the process of clicking through multiple shop pages that frustrates almost a quarter of online shoppers.

Improves Your Store’s Rankings in Search Engine Results

Ranking well in search engine results is crucial to improving the discoverability of your online store – after all, 68% of online experiences start with a search engine. Product filters can help your site’s search engine results page (SERP) rankings in two main ways:

• They improve the user experience of your store (as we have already seen), reducing bounce rate and signaling to search engines that your site is relevant to searchers’ requirements.
• Using the right product filter plugin, they enable you to bulk-generate SEO-friendly landing pages, increasing the visibility of your site in search results for specific search terms (more on that later).

What Features Should You Look for in a Product Filter?

Product filters can provide a huge amount of flexibility for the search experience on your WooCommerce store, but in order to get the most out of them, you need to ensure that your chosen product filter offers both a wide range of filtering options and additional features to help streamline product discovery.

To begin with, you’ll want to ensure that your chosen WooCommerce product filter enables you to filter your product catalog by a range of different taxonomies, including:

• Product category – one of the most straightforward types of filter, this enables your customers to search for specific types of products within your catalog. For example, at an apparel store, your product categories might include “T-shirts”, “Hoodies”, and “Shorts”.
• Price – as we’ve already seen, a price filter enables customers to discover products that meet their budget by setting a specific price range.
• Tags – filtering by tags provides customers with the option to search for more specific products within a wider category. For example, if you sell clothing you could create seasonal tags so your customers could search for “summer jackets” instead of having to scroll through a large number of winter jackets to find the products they are interested in.
• Stock status – enabling filtering by stock status has various benefits for user experience. Firstly, it allows customers to filter by only products that are in stock, avoiding the frustration of selecting a product only to find it is unavailable. It also enables store owners to show customers which products have limited stock, encouraging them to make faster purchases to avoid missing out.
• Color – particularly important for clothing stores, but with wide applications for other types of businesses, color filters enable customers to choose their preferred color attributes when searching through your product catalog. Color filters are often accompanied by swatches, giving customers a visual representation of the different colors available.
• Rating – positive reviews and ratings build trust and encourage customers that your products are of high quality. Offering the option to filter by rating enables your store visitors to view only products that have met the approval of existing customers.

Aside from offering a range of different filtering options, there are a couple of other things you’ll want to look out for when setting up product filters on your WooCommerce store.

Firstly, it’s important that the filtering experience is straightforward and user-friendly. Customers should be able to select filter options easily from your store’s shop and archive pages and view active filters at a glance.

You’ll also want to ensure that your filters are not too intrusive – providing filtering options in the sidebar is a good way to make them easily visible without interfering with the shopping experience, but if you want more flexibility, you might consider using a product filter that comes with its own dedicated shortcodes to enable you to place filters wherever you want on your site.

Finally, in order to streamline the shopping experience for your customers further, you’ll want to ensure that your chosen product filter supports AJAX search. AJAX product filters enable your customers to view filtered results without reloading the page. In turn, this speeds up product discovery, improving customer satisfaction and helping to boost conversion rates.

Now that we’ve considered some of the main features you should look out for in a WooCommerce product filter, let’s take a look at some of the options available for adding a product filter to your WooCommerce Elementor store.

How Do You Add a Product Filter to Your WooCommerce Elementor Store?

There are a few different options when it comes to adding product filters to your WooCommerce Elementor store – you can use WooCommerce’s default filter widgets, code your own product filters, or use an all-in-one product filter plugin.

The second option – coding your own filters – is not recommended unless you are an experienced developer, as the process is quite complex and you can easily break your site if you make any mistakes. We’ll look at the other two options – using the core WooCommerce widgets and using a third-party plugin – in more detail next.

Using WooCommerce’s Built-in Filter Widgets

WooCommerce comes with free built-in widgets for the purpose of filtering your product catalog. You can add these to your store in just a few simple steps:

• From your WooCommerce dashboard, navigate to “Appearance” > “Widgets”.
• Choose your preferred filter widgets – WooCommerce offers options for filtering by attribute, rating, and price.
• Drag your preferred widgets into your store page’s sidebar.

WooCommerce’s free widgets will provide you with basic functionality for filtering your product catalog, but they come with some limitations. For example, you can’t set up more advanced filters like color swatch filters or tag filters, and the default WooCommerce filters don’t support AJAX. This means that every time your customers apply a new filter, they’ll need to refresh the page, resulting in a clunky user experience and slower loading times for your site.

Using a Product Filter Plugin

In contrast to the filters included with WooCommerce’s core feature set, product filters provided by third-party WordPress plugins offer greater flexibility and advanced functionality for your store. These plugins are typically very straightforward to setup, requiring no specialist knowledge to add advanced product filters to your store in a matter of minutes.

With this in mind, using a product filter plugin is our recommended solution for adding product filters to your WooCommerce store. Next, we’ll take a look at exactly which WooCommerce product filter plugin you should use and how to set it up.

Which WooCommerce Product Filter Plugin is Best?

When it comes to adding advanced product filtering functionality to your WooCommerce Elementor store, WooCommerce Product Filter from Premmerce ticks all the boxes. The plugin comes with a range of advanced features that make it one of the best product filter plugins on the market.

Single Widget for All Filters

WooCommerce Product Filter provides a number of advanced filters that aren’t available with the core WooCommerce functionality, enabling you to filter by stock status, tags, colors, brand (with the free WooCommerce Brands plugin from Premmerce) custom taxonomies, alongside a range of other options.

Better yet, all of these filtering options are contained within a single filter widget. This makes it a much more user-friendly and scalable solution than the default WooCommerce filter, which requires you to add a separate filter widget for each different taxonomy you want to filter by.

The filter widget included with WooCommerce Product Filter is also far more customizable than the default WooCommerce offering. You can set up different input field types for your different filter taxonomies, including checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdown lists, or image and color swatches. You can also manually adjust which filters are visible and which product categories and tags appear in your filters on the fly from your WordPress dashboard.

Streamlined Search Experience

WooCommerce Product Filter creates a much more efficient, user-friendly search experience for your customers with a number of features that make it much easier for site visitors to find what they are looking for.

As well as filtering the shop and archive pages of your store, WooCommerce Product Filter also enables search filtering, allowing users to narrow down results by their chosen taxonomy, in turn helping them to find their preferred products faster.

The plugin also offers the option to automatically hide unavailable attributes, saving your customers time searching for products that are not available, and supports AJAX filtering, avoiding annoying page reloads every time your store visitors filter by a different taxonomy.

Improved SEO for Your Store

As well as improving the searching and filtering experience on your online store itself, WooCommerce Product Filter can help to bring more traffic to your site by generating SEO-friendly landing pages for your filter results, individually or in bulk.

This helps your product discoverability by helping your site to appear in organic search results for keywords related to specific product searches. For example, if you had generated an SEO-friendly landing page for all of your products that match the filters of “Men’s”, “T-shirt” and “Blue”, it would stand a much higher chance of ranking for the keyword “Men’s blue T-shirt” than your main shop page, driving more traffic to your online store.

Aside from these powerful features for improving your site’s user experience, boosting its visibility in search results, and driving more conversions for your WooCommerce store, you can be confident that WooCommerce Product Filter will be a great fit for your business, as it is compatible with all of the most popular WordPress themes, page builders (including Elementor, as we will demonstrate next), and other popular plugins.

WooCommerce Product Filter is available from $69.99/year for a single site license, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

How to Set Up WooCommerce Product Filter in Elementor

As we mentioned above, WooCommerce Product Filter has wide compatibility with all of the most popular WordPress themes and page builders. Elementor is no exception; you can set up WooCommerce Product Filter on your WooCommerce store built with Elementor in just a few steps:

Step 1: Download and Install the Plugin

You can download WooCommerce Product Filter directly from the Premmerce website. Once you have downloaded and unzipped the file, copy the plugin folder into the “/wp-content/plugins/directory” folder of your WordPress folder. You can then activate the product filter from the Plugin menu in the WordPress Dashboard.

Step 2: Set Up Your Preferred Filters

Once the plugin is installed, navigate to “Premmerce” > “Product Filter” from your WordPress dashboard. From the “Attributes” tab, you can configure which taxonomies will appear on your filter widget (for example, categories, tags, color, etc.) and make adjustments to their appearance, including:

• Configuring the filter input field type (for example, checkbox, radio button, slider).
• Choosing how each filter is displayed (options include dropdown, scroll, hoverable dropdown, and more).
• Setting whether the filter will be visible on the store front end.

Note that there are a few filters which are not set up from the “Attributes” tab, including the price, rating, on-sale, and in-stock filters. To turn these filters on, simply navigate to the “Settings” tab and check the box next to the relevant filter.

If you want further control over your filters, WooCommerce Product Filter enables you to select exactly which categories and tags appear as filtering options on the store front end. Simply navigate to the “Categories” or “Tags” tabs and toggle the visibility of the categories you do or don’t want to display.

Step 3: Configure Your Filter Display Options

Once you have set up your preferred filters, there are several more options you can configure in order to optimize the search experience for your customers.

Firstly, from the “Settings” tab, you can choose which pages your product filters are displayed on. By default, you can display filters on the product category, tag, search, store, and attribute pages, but it is worth noting that dedicated shortcodes are available that enable you to show your filters wherever you want on your store.

Next, you can set up AJAX settings for your product filters. Simply check the box next to “Enable AJAX” to set up AJAX for your filters across your store. You can also enable deferred loading to optimize your page load speed.

From this page, you can also make any customizations that you like to the appearance of your filter widget using custom CSS code.

Step 4: Display Your Filters With Elementor

Once you have finished customizing your filters and settings, they will be ready for display on your store’s front end. Regardless of which page builder you use, your filters will display perfectly, as WooCommerce Product Filter is compatible with all of the most popular page builders.

If you want even more control over where you display your filters on your WooCommerce Elementor store, you can use the product filter shortcodes in conjunction with the dedicated Elementor widget to place your filters wherever you want on your storefront.

Simply navigate to the page you want to display the filter on, click “Edit with Elementor”, then find the “Shortcode” widget under the “Elements” tab. Drag and drop the widget where you want it on the page, then paste in the WooCommerce Product Filter shortcode to embed the product filter on the page.

Streamline Your WooCommerce Elementor Store’s Search Experience With WooCommerce Product Filters

If you want to make it easier for your customers to find their desired products quickly, you should add product filters to your WooCommerce store. WooCommerce product filters enable your customers to easily filter your product catalog by taxonomies such as price, categories, tags, stock status, color, and rating, making it much faster to find the products they are looking for.

While WooCommerce comes with a default product filter widget, it only offers limited flexibility and is not a scalable solution for larger WooCommerce stores. WooCommerce Product Filter from Premmerce, on the other hand, offers a range of powerful filtering options that are easy to set up and adjust from a dedicated dashboard.

The plugin also works perfectly with all major page builders, so you can be sure it will be a perfect fit for your WooCommerce store built with Elementor. Try WooCommerce Product Filter from $69.99/month to streamline the user experience of your online store and boost conversions.