How to set and add featured products in WooCommerce

WooCommerce featured products allow online store owners to showcase specific items on their website. It’s a great way to draw attention to the best-selling products, products that are currently on sale, or products you’d like to promote.

WooCommerce featured products in a table layout

With WooCommerce, you can showcase featured products in different parts of your online store – on sidebars, above the fold on your sales page, and even in blog posts. It also makes it incredibly easy to toggle featured products on and off.

With this in mind, in this article, we’ll explain how you can set and add featured products in WooCommerce and display them in a neat, front-end table layout. Before we begin, let’s quickly take a look at some different scenarios where you might want to add featured products to your online store.

Setting WooCommerce featured products lets you easily boost product visibility on your website. As a result, you’re able to effectively run all sorts of marketing campaigns and ultimately increase sales.

Aside from this, here are some more reasons why you might want to add featured products to your online store:

  • Special offers To promote items that you’re offering at a discount. This is also great for running marketing campaigns, selling bundled products, or just about any other kind of limited time offer.
  • Getting rid of old stock Online store owners that need to get rid of old stock buried in their online store can use the WooCommerce featured products option to showcase them on their store’s front page, or using sidebars.
  • High-conversion products WooCommerce featured products also make it easy for online store owners to put their best-selling products front and center. This is a great way to get products in front of customers and skyrocket sales.
  • Certain types of products are in demand at different times of the year If you sell seasonal products – such as shorts and jackets, recreation items, or back to school products – then you might consider using WooCommerce featured products to showcase items that are seasonally high in demand.

As you can see, there are countless scenarios where you might need to set and add featured products to your online store. Before we jump into the tutorial, let’s quickly step through some examples of businesses that might need to feature products on their online store.

The neat thing about featured products in WooCommerce is that just about any type of online store can benefit from them. This includes both digital products and physical goods.

Use case scenario: Graphic or digital art

If you sell graphics, digital art, mockups, templates, or any other type of digital product, you can use the WooCommerce featured product option to increase product visibility. This is also a great way to showcase your best-selling products.

Packreate example

Take a look at how Packreate features some mockups and a 3D PSDs on their site’s home page. It immediately entices visitors to check out the featured items.

Use case scenario: Apparel

If you own an online store that sells apparel, using the WooCommerce featured products option is a must. Whether you’re trying to promote products on sale or quickly sell out seasonal items, setting them as featured products will help capture visitors' attention.

Reformation example

Here’s an example of how Reformation does it. See how they’re promoting an item from three different product categories, along with a Sale: up to 70% off message on their homepage.

The main difference between selling physical products and digital products online is shipping and delivery. Physical products need to be shipped to customers, whereas digital goods can immediately be made available for download (either directly through the online store or via email).

By now you should have a good understanding of what types of online stores would need to set and add WooCommerce featured products. Next, we’ll walk you through a quick tutorial explaining how you can set featured products in WooCommerce without having to mess around with code.

The good news is that setting and adding featured products in WooCommerce is incredibly easy. In addition to this, you can easily toggle between featured products, in case you need to change things up week after week.

Assuming you already have a WooCommerce store set up with some products added to it, here’s what you need to do to set and add featured products in WooCommerce to your online store.

Add and set featured products

With WooCommerce, there are two main ways to set featured products – through the product page and from the All Products screen.

When you’re adding new products to your online store, you can use the Featured option under Publish settings to mark products as featured products in WooCommerce.

Set featured products from the edit product screen

Another way to set featured products in WooCommerce is by marking them in the product listings.

Set WooCommerce featured products by toggling star icon

All you have to do is navigate to Products -> All Products from the admin panel and click on the star icon for each product you’d like to feature.

Switch featured products around

If you sell seasonal products or need to get rid of inventory quickly, you might need to switch featured products around frequently. The easiest way to do this is from the products listings screen (i.e. Products -> All Products).

When you hover over the star icon, it will tell you if the product is featured or not. Simply clicking on the star icon lets you toggle it on and off.

Increase (or decrease) featured product visibility (less flexible option)

There are a few different ways to display WooCommerce featured products on your online store. The option you decide to go with depends on your specific needs, the types of products you sell, and how many of them you’d like to feature on each page.

For example, you can add this shortcode to any WordPress page or post you’d like to add WooCommerce featured products to:

[featured_products per_page="12" columns="4" orderby="date" order="desc"]

This shortcode would display all 12 of your featured products in a grid layout (4 columns and 3 rows). It would look something like this:

Featured products shortcode preview

The problem with this approach is that some of your featured products might not be immediately visible to customers. If you need to showcase lots of WooCommerce featured products on your online store, you might instead consider using the WooCommerce Product Table plugin.

Display WooCommerce featured products in a table layout to increase visibility (more flexible option)

Once you have the WooCommerce Product Table plugin installed and activated to your WordPress website, you can simply use the term option with the [product_table] shortcode to any page or post you’d like to display the featured products in WooCommerce on.

For example, you could add the shortcode:

[product_table term="product_visibility:featured"]

to your page or post. It would look something like this on your site’s front-end:

WooCommerce featured products in a table layout

Conclusion

Setting and adding featured products in WooCommerce is a great way to draw attention to specific items, increase visibility, and boost sales. By listing featured products in a table layout, you can easily showcase multiple featured products in a neat front-end table layout with search, sort, and filter options.

What different types of products are you thinking of listing as featured products? Let us know by commenting below!

2 Comments

  1. Hi Maria,
    many thanks for the great post!
    I found this blog post because I am looking to generate an automatic rotation of featured products.
    For example: dress of the week.
    You already described it in this post as "switch featured products around"
    Do you have an idea how to do this automatically so that the items change weekly. So far I have not found a solution.
    As far as I know, you can only set a start and expiration date for sale prices. Do you know of a way to do this for featured products?
    I would be pleased to hear from you,
    best regards, René

    • Hi, Rene. Thanks for your comments and the kind words. You can consider using the Post Expirator plugin to automatically hide/remove featured products by changing their Status from Published to Draft at a certain date. This could help in devising a system wherein featured products are sorted by date, and then the products at the top of the list become hidden/expired thereby moving the remaining products up the list. I hope this makes sense and helps. Best regards.

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