How to Bulk Edit WooCommerce Category Terms & Taxonomies

This guide shows you how to bulk edit WooCommerce product category taxonomy terms directly using a spreadsheet. Unlike editing product-level category assignments, this workflow focuses on modifying the category terms themselves, including titles, slugs, descriptions, thumbnails, display types, and parent hierarchies.

Important: If you are looking to assign, replace, or remove categories across your product catalog, read our guide on how to bulk edit categories in WooCommerce products.

Managing hundreds of category terms in native WooCommerce requires opening each term individually under Products > Categories. But with the WP Sheet Editor – Taxonomy Terms plugin, you can manage all category terms in a spreadsheet.

The plugin creates dedicated spreadsheets for all WordPress and WooCommerce taxonomies:

• Product categories
• Product tags
• Product attributes
• Post categories and tags
• Custom taxonomies

Step 1: Open the product categories spreadsheet

Once installed and activated, navigate to WP Sheet Editor > Edit categories, tags, attributes, taxonomies and click Edit Product categories.

You will see all your category terms loaded as editable rows in the spreadsheet.

Step 2: Filter the category terms you want to edit

To edit multiple category terms simultaneously, click Bulk Edit on the top toolbar.

In the Select the rows that you want to update dropdown, choose how to target your categories:

• Edit all rows from my current search: Updates every category term currently loaded in the spreadsheet.
• I want to search rows to update: Opens the search parameters to filter specific categories.

Filter categories by keyword or parent term

To filter categories by term name or parent category, use these search fields:

• Contains keyword: Finds category terms containing specific text.
• Parent keyword: Filters subcategories assigned under specific parent terms.

Filter categories using advanced parameters

Check Enable advanced filters to query category terms by specific metadata keys.

• By missing thumbnails: Set Field key to thumbnail_id, Operator to =, and Value to 0 to locate categories without images.
• By product count: Set Field key to product_count, select an operator (e.g., =, <, >), and enter the product count value.
• By display type: Set Field key to _display_type, Operator to =, and Value to Default, Products, Subcategories, or Both.

Step 3: Execute bulk updates on category terms

Once your search filters are applied, configure the update action in the Bulk Edit tool.

1. Bulk update category status or delete terms

To delete or change the status of all filtered category terms:

• Select the field you want to edit: Status
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Delete
• Click Execute Now.

2. Prepend text to category titles or descriptions

To add text to the beginning of category titles or descriptions:

• Select the field you want to edit: Title or Description
• Select type of edit: Prepend
• Enter the value to prepend: Enter the prefix text.
• Click Execute Now.

3. Append text to category titles or descriptions

To append text to the end of category titles or descriptions:

• Select the field you want to edit: Title or Description
• Select type of edit: Append
• Enter the value to append: Enter the suffix text.
• Click Execute Now.

4. Convert category terms into tags or custom taxonomies

To reclassify category terms into product tags or another taxonomy:

• Select the field you want to edit: Taxonomy
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Select target taxonomy (e.g., product_tag).
• Click Execute Now.

5. Bulk upload category thumbnail images

To assign a thumbnail image to all selected categories:

• Select the field you want to edit: Thumbnail
• Select type of edit: Set value
• We will replace the existing media file with this file: Upload an image file or paste an image URL.
• Click Execute Now.

Bulk editing category terms in WooCommerce is really simple!

You can do advanced searches and apply massive changes with the Categories, Tags, Product Attributes, Taxonomies Spreadsheet plugin.