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[Guide] Customize WooCommerce Shop Page With Page Builder (Elementor/Beaver…)

customize woocommerce shop page

In the previous post on the same topic, I showed you how to customize WooCommerce shop page using a template file. Though it works, many people find it hard to follow since they have to access files on the server. This post will show you another way, easier, friendlier for people who doesn’t want to mess up with code.

We are going to customize the shop page using page builders such as Elementor, Visual Composer, Beaver, Divi… or any page builder you have. You can completely change the layout, the designs, the type of products, number of products display on the shop page without writing any code yourself. I promise at the end of this post, you can start working on designing your WooCommerce shop page without any problem.

In case you got some problems, no worries. You can simply contact me or leave a comment below, I’ll get back to you.

Let’s get started!

How To Customize WooCommerce Shop Page Using Page Builders

The idea is very simple. Here are the steps:

  1. You will create a page that display your products with your favorite page builder
  2. You will set that page as your shop page

And that’s that! There isn’t a third step.

In case you want to watch a video tutorial instead, I’ve made one here:

If you are still with me, let’s dive in.

Step 1: Create a page listing your products with your page builder

I’m not going to show you how to use your page builder (Elementor, VC, Divi…) in this post since I assume that you have already know how to use them. I’m going to use Elementor. I’m going to create a page like this on my site:

create a new page to use as shop page in elementor

As you can see, I have a blank page. Let’s say I want to have three section on my shop page:

  1. Featured products
  2. Best selling products
  3. New arrival products

I’m going to create three headings first:

create the headings for the shop page

Now, I’m going to fill the products to this page. How can I do that?

Fill the products to the shop page using WooCommerce products shortcode

It’s time to use some shortcodes to display the products we want on the page. You can find the extensive list of WooCommerce shortcodes here

However, to include products, you only need to know these ones:

  1. [featured_products]: List featured products. If you don’t know what featured products are or want to know how to create featured products, I’ve made an extensive WooCommerce featured products tutorial here
  2. [best_selling_products]: List of your best sellers
  3. top_rated_products]: Top rated products
  4. [sale_products]: Products are on sales
  5. [recent_products]: New products
  6. [products]: This is the most powerful shortcode. If you don’t add any attributes, then it will list all the products on your store

You maybe eager to start adding the shortcodes to your page and you can. However, there are some very important things about the shortcodes attributes you may want to know first.

Set number of columns: How many columns do you want to use to display the products? The default number is 4, however, you can set any other number you like. For example, you want to display best selling products in 3 columns, you’ll use this shortcode[best_selling_products columns="3"]

Here is what it look like when I set 3 columns:

best selling products shortcode 3 columns woocommerce

 

Limit the number of products displayed: You may notice that though we have the products displayed in 3 columns, you possibly want to limit the number of products. For example, if I want to limit the number of products to only 9 (three rows), I’ll use this attribute:limit

So, the shortcode to display top 9 best selling products in 3 columns would be:

[best_selling_products limit="9" columns="3"]

Easy, right?

Specify the categories to get products from: You may want to have a section that display products from specific category(ies) only. In such case, you’ll use the category attribute. You are going to need the category’s slug to make this work. What is the category’s slug? Simple, go to Products->Categories, under the category, click on Quick Edit:

find category slug

You’ll see the category’s slug in the Slug field.

So, in this example, if I want to display all products in the category Business PC, I would use this:

[products category="business-pc"]

If I want to display products from Business PC and Laptop (given the slug of the Laptop category is laptop), I would use this shortcode:

[products category="business-pc, laptop"]

Now, you have all you need to start adding products to the new page. Here is what I have after adding the shortcodes:

final shop page created by page builder

I must admit, I’m not a good designer but from here, you can see that you can create a custom layout for your shop page.

Now, it’s time to make this page your official shop page.

Set the page as our new shop page

The first thing  you need to do know is to create a child theme to enter a bit of code. You can put the code right in the functions.php file of your current theme but that’s a bad practice. Future update of your theme can wipe out all your changes. If you need help creating child themes, I have a quick tutorial here on this matter.

Now, I assume that you have created your child theme. Let’s first grab the URL of the page you have just created, then go to Appearance->Theme Editor:

[Guide] Customize WooCommerce Shop Page With Page Builder (Elementor/Beaver...) 1

If you see any warning popup, just click on “I understand”.

Now, your interface might be different from what I have here:

paste the code in functions file to make it works

However, most of the time, you’ll see the “Theme Function” file on the right. Just click on that and paste the following code at the end of that file:

add_action('template_redirect', 'bc_010101_redirect_woo_pages');

function bc_010101_redirect_woo_pages()
{
 
 
 if (is_shop())
 {
  //don't remove the quotes(')
  wp_redirect('http://localhost/wordpress/my-shop-page/');
  exit;
 }
}

Make sure you replace your own URL inside wp_redirect.

Now, save the page and if you go to your original shop page, you’ll see the new page display.

Conclusion

As you can see, it is quite simple to customize WooCommerce shop page using page builder. There is a bit of code to enter, however, you don’t need to understand that code to make things work. One of the most important thing you need to do is to create a child theme to enter the code. It’s much safer than entering the code directly to the theme you currently use.

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How To Customize WooCommerce Shop Page In 5 Minutes Without A Plugin

How To Customize WooCommerce Shop Page In 5 Minutes Without A Plugin 2

Want to customize the shop page using page builders such as Elementor, Beaver? Check this guide out.

WooCommerce shop page is like a category page in WordPress, there is no built in tool (like the editor) to customize its look. If you have been trying to customize WooCommerce shop page without any success, you are at the right place.  At the end of this post, you will know everything you need to customize your shop page to your liking. Let’s get started.

Here are the steps we are going to do to customize the shop page:

  1. Create a child theme of your current theme (if you haven’t)
  2. Create the folder structure for the WooCommerce shop page template in your child theme
  3. Creating content for your WooCommerce shop page

Create a child theme of your current theme (if you haven’t)

Creating a child theme is necessary to customize woocommerce shop page. Actually, if you want to do any customization to your theme or other plugins (such as WooCommerce), create a child theme. It is the safest way to add functions or change styles in WordPress. Creating a child theme isn’t hard. I’ve made a tutorial here so you can follow easily. It will not take you more than a few minutes to read:

Step by step guide to create child theme in WordPress

Create the folder structure for the WooCommerce shop page template in your child theme

IMPORTANT! Your editing interface might be different to what I’m showing here. However, the files are under yoursite/wp-content/themes/your-theme

So I assume that you have created the child theme. In this example, I’ll use a child theme that I’ve created for storefront. The theme folder is storefront-child-theme:

create child theme folder

Let’s navigate to the theme folder and create a folder named woocommerce:

create woocommerce folder inside child theme

Inside that folder, we are going to create a file called archive-product.php

create shop page templete in woocommerce folder

This archive-product.php is the WooCommerce shop page template file.

Now, if you have followed and done all the steps mentioned above (with the child theme activated), when you visit your shop page, you should see a blank page.

Congratulations, you have successfully customized your WooCommerce shop page.

Creating content for your WooCommerce shop page

Now, it is totally up to you to customize the design of the shop page. If I open the file archive-product.php in a text editor and put the following content:

<h1>Hello this is the shop page</h1>

Then, if I go back to the shop page, sure enough, I’ll see this:

example text on the shop page

It doesn’t look really attractive though. If you are confident in your design and HTML skills, you can stop reading here and start working on your shop page. However, if you just need something that has similar layout to your post’s and allows you to control the products that display on it, read on.

Create shop page template from post’s template

Now, let’s see how quickly you can customize your store shop page using your post’s template. Let’s go to the parent theme of the child theme you’ve created and copy a file named single.php. If that isn’t available, you can copy index.php instead. In my case, I have both single.php and index.php available so I’ll choose single.php.

List of templates file in wordpress theme

Let’s go to our child theme folder, paste the file into woocommerce folder:

paste the single file in woocommerce folder

Now, let’s delete the archive-product.php file and rename the single.php file to archive-product.php. Basically, we’ve replaced the archive-product.php file with the post’s template file.

If I go to the shop page now, I’ll see something like this:

new shop page design from post template

The products are listed basically displayed as posts are.

We are going to use the power of WooCommerce shortcodes to make it looks like a real shop page. You can grab woocommerce shortcodes here to match your need.

So, for example, I want to display products from all categories in 3 columns, 12 products max. The shortcode will be:

woocommerce product shortcode

But where do you put the shortcode? In the archive-product.php file of course.

Let’s open archive-product.php file (inside your child theme folder/woocommerce). Different theme has different structure. This is mine:

content of archive product

You should delete the part between <main and </main. Then, put the following code right at the position of the code you deleted:

How To Customize WooCommerce Shop Page In 5 Minutes Without A Plugin 3

The content of archive-product.php looks like this:

display the woocommerce shortcode in the shop page

Save the file and go to the shop page, here is what I got:

customize woocommerce shop page

You can see, it looks a lot like a shop page now. If you know HTML, you can add additional code in to make the page more lively. In my experience, I just need to play with shortcodes to accomplish my desired design.

Conclusion

That’s it! That’s how you customize WooCommerce shop page. As always, I hope you find the tutorial helpful. Don’t hesitate to ask if you have questions.