Convert WooCommerce Attributes to Categories or Tags (And Vice Versa)

Learn how to easily convert WooCommerce product attributes into categories or tags in bulk, and vice-versa, without writing a single line of code or doing manual data entry.

Sometimes you create a bunch of products and want to see how the catalog will look on your frontend, but you realize that you made a structural mistake.

For example, you might have created hundreds of products using “Color” or “Brand” as Attributes, but those attributes don’t generate dedicated archive pages or appear on your main site menu. To fix your site navigation and SEO structure, you actually needed to use Product Categories instead of Attributes.

Or perhaps you made the exact opposite mistake: you created “Red” and “Blue” as Categories, but now you want to convert those categories into attributes to allow users to select their preferred color via a dropdown menu when adding a variable product to the cart.

Having to open and edit all those products manually to migrate the data is painful and can take hours! But don’t worry.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to convert WooCommerce product attributes into product categories or tags—and vice-versa—in just a few clicks using a bulk editing spreadsheet.

1. Install the WP Sheet Editor Plugin

WP Sheet Editor is a powerful plugin that allows you to manage and bulk edit WooCommerce products easily.

Instead of the slow WordPress interface, you can view all your products at once in a spreadsheet, make advanced searches, and use a cool feature that lets you update hundreds of products at once using formulas and dynamic data copying.

The first step in this tutorial is to install and activate WP Sheet Editor. If you already have it installed on your store, you can skip to the next step.

2. Set up the WooCommerce Products Spreadsheet

When you install WP Sheet Editor, you’ll see a quick setup page. This helps you define exactly what data you want to see.

This is very easy: you just need to enable the “Products” spreadsheet, then select the fields (like Categories, Tags, and your custom Attributes) that you want to display as columns by dragging and dropping them to the active side.

You can follow this setup tutorial for more detailed information.

3. Open the WP Sheet Editor interface

Once configured, go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Products. You will see a spreadsheet that contains all your products with all their taxonomy and attribute information neatly organized in columns.

4. How to Convert Product Attributes into Categories

If you want to convert WooCommerce product attributes—like a “Brand” attribute, or “Size” attribute—into native WooCommerce categories so they appear in your store’s navigation menu, follow these steps:

a) Search for the specific products you want to edit

First, we need to isolate the products that contain the attributes we want to convert. You can do this by opening the Search tool on the top toolbar.

Once the tool is open, you can easily filter your products by keyword, category, attribute, or tag.

• To look for all products containing a specific attribute (like “Size: Medium”), type that attribute into the “Enter Product type, attribute or tag…” field.
• Then hit the Run search button.

b) Use the “Bulk Edit” tool to copy data from Attribute to Category

After the products have been filtered, you will need to open the Bulk Edit tool, located in the plugin’s top toolbar.

Inside the popup, we will instruct the plugin to copy the existing attribute data and paste it into the category field. Enter the following 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: Select “Product category” as the destination field.
• Select type of edit: Choose “Copy from other columns”.
• Copy from this column: Enter the dynamic column key for your attribute. For example, if you are converting the Size attribute, type $pa_size$.
• Select Edit only parent products.
• Hit the “Execute now” button.

All the attribute terms will be copied and converted into WooCommerce categories!

5. How to Convert Product Categories into Attributes

What if you need to do the exact opposite? Let’s suppose you mistakenly created a category called “Large”, but you actually want to copy it to the “Product Size” attribute column so customers can select it on the frontend product page. This is what you need to do:

a) Search for the products you want to edit

Open the Search tool again to filter the items.

Since we are looking for all products assigned to the “Large” category, type “Large” into the “Enter Product category…” field and select it from the dropdown.

Then hit the Run search button.

b) Convert categories into attributes in bulk

Now that the target products have been filtered, open the Bulk Edit tool.

Once the tool is open, we will instruct the plugin to copy the category data into the attribute field. Enter 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: Choose “Product Size” as the destination field (or Product Color, Brand, etc.).
• Select type of edit: Choose “Copy from other columns”.
• Copy from this column: Enter the Product Category key, which is $product_cat$.
• Select Edit only parent products.
• Hit the “Execute now” button.

Your category data has now been successfully converted into an attribute!

6. How to Copy Product Tags into Categories

If you have been overusing WooCommerce Tags and realize they would serve your site architecture better as parent Categories, you can easily migrate them. Just follow these steps:

a) Search for the products you want to edit

Open the Search tool located on the plugin’s toolbar.

For this example, we will look for all products utilizing a specific tag. Type the tag name into the “Enter Product category…” field (this field searches tags dynamically as well).

Then hit the “Run search” button.

b) Bulk copy the Tags into Categories

With your tagged products filtered, open the Bulk Edit tool.

Configure the tool with the following settings to execute the data transfer:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Choose “All the rows from my current search”.
• What field do you want to edit: Select “Product categories” as your destination field.
• Select type of edit: Choose “Copy from other columns”.
• Copy from this column: Enter the dynamic key for tags, which is $product_tag$.
• Select Edit only parent products.
• Click the “Execute now” button.

Pro Tip: If you want to do the exact opposite and convert categories into tags, simply change the destination field to “Product tags” and the copy-from column to $product_cat$.

Fix Your WooCommerce Taxonomy in Minutes

Easy, right?

With the WP Sheet Editor plugin, you never have to spend hours manually doing data entry or writing complex SQL queries to restructure your store. Whether you need to convert attributes into categories, turn categories into attributes, or migrate your product tags, you can easily bulk edit thousands of WooCommerce products in just a few clicks.