How to Bulk Discontinue WooCommerce Products (And Protect Your SEO)

In this article, we explain how to properly discontinue or hide end-of-life products from the catalog of your WooCommerce store without hurting your search engine rankings.

Managing an active e-commerce store means dealing with a constantly evolving inventory. Some common reasons for discontinuing products include fixing catalog errors, upgrading to new product models (like replacing last year’s electronics), or permanently removing items that your suppliers no longer manufacture.

In these cases, the most immediate reaction for many store owners is to delete the obsolete items or convert them to drafts so that they do not appear in the store’s frontend catalog.

This option, although immediate, is highly detrimental to your business for the following reasons:

• Your site’s SEO will be negatively affected: Deleting a page removes it from Google’s index, throwing away months or years of accumulated SEO authority.
• You create broken links (404 errors): If customers have bookmarked the item, or if external blogs link to it, they will land on a dead 404 error page.
• You lose cross-selling opportunities: You miss the chance to sell alternative or upgraded items by suggesting related merchandise on the discontinued product page.

That’s why, in this comprehensive tutorial, we will show you how to use bulk actions in WooCommerce to manage your product lifecycle correctly. Instead of selecting and removing each product individually, we will explain how to use a bulk edit tool to mark selected items as discontinued seamlessly.

You will save hours of administrative work because you won’t have to edit one product at a time, and you will avoid falling into the SEO mistakes we mentioned above.

Install WP Sheet Editor and WooCommerce Discontinued Products

To implement this workflow, we will combine the power of two robust plugins.

The WP Sheet Editor plugin allows you to apply changes to thousands of WooCommerce products with just some clicks. It replaces the slow default editor with an intuitive spreadsheet interface and includes powerful tools such as the “Bulk Edit” and advanced “Search” functions.

WooCommerce Discontinued Products adds a dedicated “Discontinued” stock status to WooCommerce so that you can manage end-of-life products separately from other standard stock statuses (e.g., out of stock or on backorder).

It also preserves the SEO authority for your discontinued product pages, keeps the URLs active, removes the add-to-cart button, and helps keep customers informed about the item’s status.

GET THE “WOOCOMMERCE DISCONTINUED PRODUCTS” PLUGIN

Together, these plugins can be used to discontinue products from your WooCommerce catalog in bulk effortlessly. You can skip this setup step if you already have both plugins installed and activated.

Once you install and activate both plugins, navigate to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Products, and you’ll see the spreadsheet containing all your products and their complete data.

1. How to Discontinue Products Individually Using the Spreadsheet

Using the products spreadsheet, you can edit multiple products in record time without having to open dozens of individual product tabs.

To discontinue your products individually directly in the grid:

1. Go to the Manage Stock column and disable this option by unchecking the box.
2. Go to the Stock Status column, click the dropdown, and select Discontinue.
3. Hit the Save button on the top toolbar to apply the changes to your live store.

2. How to Bulk Discontinue Selected WooCommerce Products

Besides updating inventory individually (which already helps you save time), you can bulk discontinue hundreds of selected products simultaneously using our Bulk Edit tool.

First, let’s see how you can filter the specific obsolete items you want to discontinue. For this, let’s use the Search tool.

This advanced search tool allows you to search for your WooCommerce products using any field, category, attribute, or value as a search parameter. For example, if you are clearing out an old clothing collection, we’ll search for products containing the “jeans” keyword in their titles.

• Enter the desired keyword in the Contains Keyword field (e.g., “jeans”).
• Hit Run search.

Now that your products are successfully filtered, only the targeted items will be displayed on the spreadsheet.

Important Step: Before enabling the Discontinued stock status, you need to disable the Manage Stock checkbox globally for all the selected products. Otherwise, WooCommerce’s native inventory management might conflict with the new status.

For this, open the Bulk Edit tool on the top toolbar.

Once you’re in the Bulk Edit tool, select the following values to disable the Manage Stock option for all the selected products:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Manage Stock
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: No
• Select Edit only parent products.
• Hit Execute Now.

Finally, open the Bulk Edit tool again and select the following values to bulk discontinue all the filtered products:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Stock status
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Discontinued
• Select Edit only parent products.
• Hit Execute Now.

Once the bulk edit is complete, you can review the Stock Status column in your spreadsheet. You’ll see that the Manage Stock checkbox is cleanly disabled and the Discontinued value has been correctly applied to all the filtered products.

3. Easily Find All Discontinued Products in Your Store

Auditing your inventory is a breeze when you have the right tools. The Search tool allows you to use any field as a search parameter, and the Discontinued status is no exception. This is perfect if you ever need to review all obsolete items or permanently delete them later.

Let’s see how to find all the discontinued products in your store. First, open the Search tool.

Once you open the tool, input the following configuration to search for your end-of-life catalog:

• Tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox.
• Field: Stock status
• Operator: =
• Value: Discontinued
• Now just hit Run Search.

Once you run the search, the plugin will scan your database and instantly display all the discontinued products on the spreadsheet grid. You can verify the applied filter highlighted above the spreadsheet.

4. Optional Strategy: Append a Message to Discontinued Product Titles

Communication is key to a good user experience. WP Sheet Editor allows you to append or prepend text to your product titles in bulk. This is highly useful because you can add a clear visual indicator, like “– Discontinued Product“, to the titles of all obsolete items so customers instantly know the status before they even click the link.

Step 1. Find the discontinued products by running the advanced search outlined in the previous section.

Step 2. Open the Bulk Edit tool.

Step 3. Select the following values to append a “Discontinued product” label at the end of the product titles:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Title
• Select type of edit: Append
• Enter the value to append to the existing value: Make sure you add a blank space before the message so the formatting looks clean. For example, we will type - Discontinued Product (without the quotation marks).
• Hit Execute Now.

This is what your beautifully updated product titles will look like on the spreadsheet:

5. Optional Strategy: Add an SEO-Friendly Notice to Product Descriptions

You can also quickly add an explanatory message directly to the content body of your discontinued product pages. This allows you to explain why the item is gone and link to a newer replacement model, saving the sale!

Just follow these simple steps:

Step 1. Find your discontinued products using the Search tool.

Step 2. Open the Bulk Edit tool.

Step 3. Use these parameters to prepend an HTML message to your long descriptions:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
• What field do you want to edit: Content
• Select type of edit: Prepend
• Enter the value to prepend to the existing value: In this case, we want the text to stand out as a subtitle, so we will insert raw HTML: <h2>This product has been discontinued</h2>
• Click on Execute Now.

Now, if you review the Content column in your spreadsheet, you’ll see the <h2> tag and message have been prepended flawlessly to your existing product content.

Stop Losing Customers and Google Rankings!

By following this workflow, it will be immediately clear to your store visitors that the products are discontinued. More importantly, you don’t have to delete the URLs or sacrifice your hard-earned Google rankings. The pages remain live, allowing you to capture that organic traffic and route it to newer, available merchandise.

Without a doubt, combining WP Sheet Editor and WooCommerce Discontinued Products is the ultimate solution to help you easily bulk manage thousands of end-of-life products at once without manual data entry.

If you want to completely hide hundreds of products from your public catalog instead of tagging them as discontinued, check out our related guide: How to Hide Products from your WooCommerce Catalog.