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How do I Add a Custom Product Attribute in WooCommerce?

woocommerce seo

WooCommerce has some fantastic features that allow you to create detailed product listings to improve customer experience. A simple and effective one is the custom product attribute. If you have various products with different features, understanding how to add a custom product attribute is an invaluable skill and we show you how to do this below.

Why are Custom Product Attributes Useful for eCommerce Stores?

  • It’s important to separate global and custom product attributes as they are often mistaken as the same thing. 
  • A global attribute is used to define a common feature of a group of products. Perhaps you create photo albums in which case a global attribute could be the number of pages in the album for example. 
  • A custom product attribute cannot be broadly applied to multiple product categories in the same way and is specific to one item. While something like the number of pages can apply to any album, the cover type or binding might vary depending on the product in which case a custom attribute would be beneficial. 
  • These items allow you to easily define your products and add more options which is ultimately better for your customers. It can also help with WooComerce SEO and utilizing keywords for your products.

How to Add a Custom Product Attribute in WooCommerce

This guide is based on the fact that you already know how to add a new product to your WooCommerce store or edit an existing item. 

Once you are used to these processes, adding a custom product attribute is relatively easy and it opens up an entirely new world of possibilities to distinguish your products and give customers a more in-depth shopping experience.

Step 1 - Add a New Product or Edit an Existing Item

To add a custom product attribute you first have to have a product in your online store. You can do this either by creating a new product or editing an existing one. 

To add a new product to go Products > Add New or to edit an existing one simply click on the relevant item from your product list in the WooCommerce product dashboard. 

Either option should show the product data toolbar where you define different parameters like shipping, inventory management, and product attributes.

Step 2 - Add the Custom Product Attribute

The “Attributes” menu is what we want and it is typically the 5th option in the list below “Linked Products”. 

Click on the “Attributes” sub-menu and you should see a drop-down list. Click on this and select “Custom product attribute” and then click “Add”. This will open a list of text boxes and options relating to the new custom attribute below.

Step 3 - Complete the Custom Product Attribute Details

  • – You now have to fill in the different sections which include: 
  • – Name: The name of the group of attributes you want to add 
  • – Value(s): The individual values of the attributes within the group – each one should be separated by a | 
  • – Visible on the product page: Make sure this is ticked so the custom attributes show on the product page. 
  • – Used for variations: If this product is a variable of a main product type you can tick “Used for variations” so the custom attribute is available for all iterations of the product. 

To give an example, let’s say that you produce custom photo albums and for your standard lay-flat album you want to offer different cover types. The “name” attribute could be “Album Covers” and the “Values” could be “Matt | Glossy | Fabric | Hardback | Leather”. When a customer clicks on the lay-flat product, providing you have the “Visible on the product page” option ticked, they should see the different cover types listed too!

Step 4 - Test

With everything completed hit the save button and this should automatically update the relative product page on your online store. Depending on the theme and layout of your WooCommerce online store the custom product attribute should now display on the relative product page. 

Whenever you make any changes to your store we advise testing it immediately and checking that the edits display as you intended by viewing your site in a web browser.

Give Your Customers More Options With Custom Product Attributes

After adding a custom product attribute once you should be able to do this easily for your other products. With this new technique you can take your product listings to the next level and give customers an in-depth shopping experience with all the choices they could ever need!

Article by:

Joshua George is the founder of ClickSlice, an SEO Agency based in London, UK.

He has eight years of experience as an SEO Consultant and was recently hired by the UK government for SEO training. Joshua also owns the best-selling SEO course on Udemy, and has taught SEO to over 100,000 students.

His work has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, AgencyAnalytics, Wix and lots more other reputable publications.