Featuring products on your home page can be a great way to attract your customers to check out specific products, increase visibility and boost sales.
Featured products on your WooCommerce store could be useful in many ways. Maybe you want to promote products that have special discounts or want to promote your high selling products.
In either case, you can set featured products with WooCommerce and then display those products on the home page of your store, in any page or post.
In this article, I will explain briefly how to add featured products in WooCommerce and how to display those featured products on your site using the shortcodes and widgets that are available in WooCommerce.
Besides the options that are available in WooCommerece, I will also cover some great plugins that would help you if you are looking for more advanced features and customizations.
Let’s Start.
How to Set Featured products in WooCommerce?
I am pretty sure, that you have installed and activated the WooCommerce plugin already.
The first thing that you need to do to display the featured products is that you need to set those products as featured.
So, there are basically 3 ways to make a product as featured in WooCommerce. They are as follows.
In the Edit Product Page
The first way is by actually marking the product as a featured product in the edit product screen. From the WordPress dashboard, go to products -> All products and edit the product that has to be featured.
In the right sidebar, you could see an option called Catalog visibility. Edit it and tick the checkbox “This is a featured product”.
From the All Products Page
The second option is to star it as featured in the All Products screen. From the WordPress dashboard, go to products -> All products. Click on the star icon on the featured column for any products that you want to be featured. You could see the star fully colored means that the product is featured.
If you don’t see the featured column with the star in the top in the All products screen, just select the screen option that you could see in the top and tick the featured options.
In the Quick Edit Page
The final option is by using the quick edit on the screen. From the WordPress dashboard, go to products -> All products. Select the Quick Edit option. Clicking Quick Edit will open up a new menu of options. Just tick the checkbox for featured.
This option will also allow you to add featured products in bulk. Just select all the products to be featured and select the “bulk actions” option that would be available at the top.
It would open up an editor as seen below and you could just toggle it to ‘Yes’ from the featured drop-down menu.
Display Featured Products in WooCommerce
By default, WooCommerce comes with 2 options to display the featured products. The first option is using the shortcode and the other is using their widgets.
WooCommerce Featured Products Shortcode:
WooCommerce has many useful shortcodes to display WooCommerce related content within any posts or pages.
To display the featured products, you should use the shortcode:
[featured_products]This shortcode helps you to display the featured product on any page or post. You could also add various attributes to these. For example:
[products limit="4" columns="2" visibility="featured" ]
This shortcode will display 4 of your featured products in 2 columns. So basically it will have two products at each row with the most recent appearing first as seen below:
WooCommerce Featured Products Widget:
WooCommerce also comes with a widget that you could use in any sidebar or footer to display your featured products.
Just navigate to Appearance -> Widgets. Find the Widget called “WooCommerce Featured Products widget” from the available widgets section and drag it to any sidebar on the right to activate it.
Then, just give it a title and select the number of products to show. Note that using this widget, you do have the option only for adjusting the title and number of products that should be displayed.
The better option is to go for the product widget that does give you some more attributes like ordering.
Appearance -> Widgets. Find the Products Widget and drag it to right.
Set the title, number of products, and under the Show option, select featured products. You could also set the order by option and whether it should be displayed in Ascending or descending format.
Featured Product Block:
You could also display the WooCommerce featured products using the Featured product block.
Note: This could be used only if you want to display a single featured product on any page or post.
If you are using the Guttenberg editor, you could use the “Featured product” block that is available in their editor.
Select the ‘+’ button and search for the ‘Featured product’ block.
Once you have added that, you could search for the product that needs to be featured.
One of the coolest things about this is that the product doesn’t need to be featured before using the steps that we discussed earlier. As you select it, it will be toggled as a featured product.
But the drawback is that you cannot display a list of featured products. You could display only one featured product.
So I hope you now have a clear on how to add featured products and how to display those featured products using the WooCommerce shortcode and Widget.
Best WooCommerce Featured Product Plugins
But functionalities that the WooCommerce offers are very limited. What if you need more flexibility? What if you don’t want to display the featured products in just grid format but also as a slider or such?
Here are some plugins that will give you more features and also more flexibility in displaying your featured products.
Product Slider / Carousel for WooCommerce
Product Slider/Carousel for WooCommerce is the best-downloaded WooCommerce featured product slider plugin in WordPress.org that allows you to display your featured products in slider format.
WooCommerce shortcodes will just allow you to display your products in a grid format, but displaying it in a slider will be more attractive to your customers and also more flexible.
Display WooCommerce Featured Products in a Slider
WooCommerce Featured Products SliderOnce you have installed and activated the Product slider plugin, go to to any page or post that you’d like to display the featured products and add the following shortcode:
[featured_products_slider]This will include a slider of your featured products.
Besides, you could add various attributes along with it like the number of the products that should be displayed at a time, the limit of the products, which categories of products to be displayed, and much more.
For example,
[featured_products_slider cats="CATEGORY-ID" limit=”5” orderby=”date” order=”DESC”]This will display your featured products slider with 5 products from the particular category Id and will display it in the order of latest to old.
The interesting part of this is that you could also set the slider speed and Autoplay speed of the slider. Isn’t that cool?
Key Features of the Product Carousel Plugin:
- Featured products slider.
- Sorting by category.
- You can set the number of columns that you want to display in the slider.
- Enable/disable the Slider Autoplay.
- Enable Touch-Swipe to just let your users swipe the product by touch.
- 100% Responsive.
WooCommerce Product Table
The problem with displaying your featured products in a grid or slider layout is that some of your important featured products might not be visible immediately to your customers.
This is where the WooCommerce product table plugin by Barn2 Media would be extremely useful for you.
WooCommerce product table plugin helps you to display your entire featured products in a single product table that increases visibility for your customers.
It also allows more flexibility to the customers like giving them options to filter, sort and even search the products that they want to see.
Display WooCommerce Featured Products in a Table Layout
Once you have installed and activated the WooCommerce product table plugin, go to to any page or post that you’d like to display the featured products and add the following shortcode:
[products_table term="product_visibility:featured"]This will display your featured products in a beautiful layout as shown below:
Key Features of Product Table Plugin:
- Add featured products in a Table format
- Instant search, sort, and filter
- You can display all your featured products or can show only specific products based on their category, tag or Id
- Customizable columns
- Easy to use
Bonus:
Besides all these options, there are certain themes and page builders that allow you to pull featured products. For example, the fusion builder comes with an integrated “Woo Featured Products Slider” Element using which you could use to showcase your featured products.
If you are using the Avada theme, the fusion builder comes as a free add-on for the theme. If you are using this theme, just go to any page and click on the Woo Featured Products Slider Element via the Fusion Builder that will allow you to display your featured products in the slider.
The advantage of using this element than others is that they have an array of options that gives you more flexibility and creative options. I hope this article gave you a clear idea of how to set up and display the WooCommerce featured products to your customers and also opened your eyes to the various options available besides what WooCommerce offers.
Feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comment section.
Can’t understand waht is the reason to exclude feautered products in woo blocks?
For client is easyst way to pick product for homepage is click on them in admin panel.
using shortcode is ok but block and woocommmerce in some cases use different css. For instance in had disabled SALE label for block however it apears for shortcode.
Where all the shortcodes gone from the official woocommerce website?
Hi, i understand how to feature products and advertise them. However when you have featured them, and they are no longer desired to be featured, how do i get a list of all the products that are currently featured?! just looking for the star or checking my site for whats left is painful. can i not sort the list or view featured only?
Cheers for any help on this