5 Methods to Hide WooCommerce Products from the Shop Catalog

In this tutorial, we’ll see how to hide WooCommerce products from the shop catalog in bulk.

There are countless reasons why you might need to remove products from your WooCommerce frontend catalog, without actually deleting them from your database nor changing their status into draft. You might be rotating out seasonal apparel, temporarily hiding items affected by supply chain shortages, keeping wholesale products away from retail customers, or retiring old models.

WooCommerce provides a built-in “Catalog Visibility” setting to handle this. By changing a product’s status to “Hidden”, it instantly vanishes from your main shop page, category archives, and search results. The problem? Doing this manually requires you to open every single product page, adjust the visibility settings, and click update. If you need to hide 500 out-of-stock items, you are looking at hours of mind-numbing manual labor.

Fortunately, you don’t have to manage your WooCommerce catalog one product at a time. With WP Sheet Editor, you can use a powerful spreadsheet interface to filter your inventory and change visibility statuses in bulk.

In this guide, we will explore 5 different ways to hide WooCommerce products from your catalog in record time.

We will use the WP Sheet Editor – WooCommerce Products plugin, which replaces the slow default WooCommerce product editor with an intuitive spreadsheet. It displays the “Visibility” field, allowing you to edit it directly in the spreadsheet or run massive bulk updates based on advanced search criteria.

1. Hide individual products in the spreadsheet

If you only need to hide a handful of random products, you don’t even need to use the Bulk Edit tool. You can make surgical adjustments directly in the spreadsheet.

Navigate to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Products.

Find the catalog Visibility column.

To hide an item, simply click on its cell in the catalog Visibility column, and enter any of these values:

• If the cell is empty = The product appears everywhere, in Shop and search results
• exclude-from-catalog = The product appears in the Search results only
• exclude-from-search = The product appears in the Shop only
• If you want to completelly hide the product from the shop and the search results (Hidden), enter exclude-from-catalog, exclude-from-search.

Make sure you click on Save to apply the changes.

The core concept for methods 2 – 4: the Bulk Edit tool

For methods 2 through 4 on this list, the workflow is always a simple two-step process:

Fist, use the Search tool to isolate the specific products you want to hide.

Second, use the Bulk Edit tool to change their catalog visibility settings.

Whenever you reach the Bulk Edit step, the configuration is always exactly the same:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Choose “Edit all the rows from my current search”.
• What field do you want to edit: Select the Visibility field.
• Select type of edit: Choose Set value.
• Replace existing value with this value:
  • If you want to exclude products from the catalog only, type exclude-from-catalog
  • If you want to exclude products from the search results only, type exclude-from-search
  • If you want to completely hide the product from both, type exclude-from-catalog, exclude-from-search.
• Select Edit only parent products.
• Click the Execute Now button.

With that core concept understood, let’s dive into the 5 different ways to bulk edit product visibility in WooCommerce!

2. Hide products by any taxonomy (category, tag, attribute, brand, etc.)

Are you moving from summer to fall? Hiding an entire seasonal category is incredibly common.

You can filter your WooCommerce products by any taxonomy term, including:

• Category
• Tag
• Brand
• Attribute (color, size, etc.)
• Visibility
• Shipping class

For example, to hide all products within a specific category, open the Search tool.

• In the Enter Brands… field, simply type the name of the category (e.g., “Gear”).
• Click Run Search.

Once the spreadsheet displays those products, open the Bulk Edit tool and set the new visibility settings.

3. Hide products by stock status (out of stock, for example)

Leaving hundreds of “Out of Stock” products visible on your shop pages frustrates customers and clutters their browsing experience. You can automatically hide them until inventory is replenished.

Open the Search tool and check the Enable advanced filters checkbox.

• Field: Stock status
• Operator: =
• Value: Out of stock
• Click Run Search.

Once you filter the out of stock products, run the Bulk Edit tool to hide them from the public catalog.

4. Hide products by price

Sometimes you need to clear out low-ticket items from your main catalog to focus on premium sales, or perhaps you want to hide items below a certain profit margin threshold.

Open the Search tool and Enable advanced filters.

• Field: Regular Price
• Operator: < (Less than)
• Value: Enter your price threshold (e.g., 10 to hide everything under $10).
• Click Run Search.

Run the Bulk Edit tool on the resulting list to instantly clean up your cheap inventory.

5. Hide products variations

Note: In the case of variations, it is better to disable them so that they do not appear in the catalog or be selectable on the product page. Therefore, we will disable them instead of editing the Visibility field.

Imagine your supplier completely stops manufacturing items made of a specific material, in a specific size or color, or you want to temporarily hide all “Extra Small” clothing items across your entire store while you fix a sizing chart issue.

Open the Search tool and select these values.

• Enter […] Product atributes: Enter the specific attribute you want to find. For example, we will search for all the variations with the Yellow color.
• Tick the Search on variations checkbox.
• Click Run Search.

Once the spreadsheet displays only the products possessing that attribute, use the Bulk Edit tool to hide them.

Once you’re in the Bulk Edit tool, you need to select these values:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Choose “Edit all the rows from my current search”.
• What field do you want to edit: Variation enabled
• Select type of edit: Choose Set value.
• Replace existing value with this value: Leave the checkbox deselected.
• Select Edit only variations.
• Click the Execute Now button.

Take control of your product’s visibility

Your WooCommerce catalog should be dynamic, presenting only the most relevant, purchasable products to your customers at any given time. Leaving discontinued, out-of-stock, or seasonal items active on your site ruins the user experience and hurts your conversion rates.

By leveraging the advanced search and bulk updating capabilities of WP Sheet Editor, managing your catalog’s visibility takes a few clicks only. Stop clicking through endless WooCommerce settings pages and take control of your inventory from a single, powerful spreadsheet!