Related products – product recommendations are a powerful marketing strategy that helps capture customer attention by showcasing complementary or similar products for WooCommerce. This approach effectively drives cross-sells. While WooCommerce and some themes offer basic related product features, these options are often limited in functionality and customization.
The Related Products – Product Recommendations for WooCommerce plugin by WebToffee enhances these recommendations, providing advanced customization options to make them more appealing and aligned with your store’s goals.
Key Features
- Flexible: Display related products from the same category, tags, or specific products.
- Slider Display: Showcase related products in an interactive slider.
- Shortcode Support: Use
[wt-related-products product_id="xx"]to display related products anywhere. - Theme Conflict Resolution: Automatically handle theme compatibility issues.
- Custom Sorting: Sort related products by title, date, slug, last modified, or randomly.
- WPML Compatibility: Show the same related products across translated versions.
- Stock Control: Exclude out-of-stock products from recommendations.
- Product/Category Exclusion: Prevent products from specific products/categories from appearing as related.
- Import Support: Import related products via code snippets—see the Import Related Products article for details.
Getting started
To access the settings:
- Navigate to WooCommerce > Related Products from the WordPress dashboard. This opens a window with all recommendation-related settings.
Working mode / Recommendation type
The plugin provides three working modes that can be switched between based on requirements. The configuration made will be retained while switching modes are used.
- Custom Related Products (Recommended) – Display related products based on the plugin settings with complete customization control.
- Default – Use WooCommerce’s default-related product settings. (You can customize the recommendation title. No other customizations are available).
- Disable recommendation – Completely disable the related products section from your site.
Custom related products
With the custom-related products template, you can control how recommendations appear and which products are displayed.
Settings Sections:
- General settings(On plugin page) – These settings apply to all related product recommendations across the store (appearance, product/category exclusions, and recommendation constraints).
- Individual product settings (On product edit page) – Override general settings for specific products and set up custom recommendations (optional; products based on general settings will display by default).
General settings
Access the general setting from WooCommerce > Related products. Configurations done here are applicable recommendations across the store. Configurations altered for individual products will override general settings(Only for the selected product).
Products to display
- Show related products in cart – Display recommendations on the cart page. (Recommendation will be displayed for the last product added to the cart)
- Related products title – Title for the related products recommendation widget.
- Display related products from – Choose to display related product recommendations from the same category, tag, or both as the currently viewed product.
You can use the following code snippet to prioritize recommendations from a subcategory. If there aren’t enough products in the subcategory, it will pull items from the main category as a fallback.
add_filter('wt_crp_subcategory_only', '__return_true');
Example:
Imagine you have this category structure:
- Men → Shirt (subcategories: Polo, Formal)
- Men → Pants
By default, if a customer is viewing a product from the Polo category, WooCommerce might also recommend items from Formal shirts(Both are in the Shirts category).
However, with this shortcode, recommendations will first prioritize Polo shirts. Products from the parent category (Shirt) will only be displayed if there aren’t enough items in the Polo subcategory to fill the recommendation section.
This ensures more relevant product suggestions for customers based on their current viewing.
For more information on adding code snippets to your WordPress theme, refer to the Adding Custom Code Snippets using a Third-Party Plugin article.
Setting individual product recommendations will override Display-related products from settings, and selected products will be displayed.
- Hide related products for categories – Disable related product recommendations for products from selected categories.
- Hide related products for products – Disable related product recommendations for selected products.
- Sort by – Sort products in the recommendation widget based on Title, Created date, Slug name, Updated date, Average rating, Popularity, or Price. You can also display them randomly.
- Sort order – Order for the sorted products. It can be displayed in Ascending or Descending order.
Recommendation widget layout
You can either display the recommendation as a product grid or a sider.
- Slider – Default is grid view. Enable to add a slider widget for all related product recommendations in the store.
- Number of products to display on slider per page – The number of products that displayed on a page without a slider/before sliding. Configured separately for desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.
- Number of products to display (Only for slider) – Maximum number of displayed products inside the widget. (for the shown example, ten related products will be displayed for each product)
- Slider width (Only for slider) – The width of the slider widget in percentage, based on the screen’s width.
- Use custom slider arrow (Only for slider) – If the slider arrow does not appear on specific themes, add a custom slider arrow to the widget.
Advanced options
- Exclude out-of-stock products – Hide out-of-stock products from appearing as related products.
- Exclude backorder products – Hide products in backorder from appearing as related products.
- Use original product(WPML) – Instead of using the translated product’s ID, use the original product’s ID to generate recommendations for WPML-translated products.
- Override the theme’s template – If the recommendations are not showing up on your store, override the theme and display them on the page.
Individual product settings
The configurations we’ve covered so far apply to all related product recommendations across the store and work seamlessly. These recommendations will appear for all relevant products based on your settings.
However, the plugin also allows you to assign custom / hand-picked product recommendations to specific products manually. This is especially useful when:
- You want to promote specific products.
- There aren’t enough products in the same category to provide meaningful recommendations, and you prefer to display hand-picked alternatives instead.
With this feature, you have greater control over the recommendations, ensuring they align with your store’s goals.
To set up custom recommendations, head to the Products tab from your WordPress dashboard and select a product for which you want to display custom recommendations.
From the product edit page, navigate to Product Data > Linked Products.
- Upsells – default WooCommerce field
- Cross-sells – default WooCommerce field
- Categories – Recommendations shown from the selected categories.
- Tags – Products with the selected tag shown as recommendations.
- Attributes – Products with the selected attribute shown as recommendations.
- Exclude product – Products from the selected categories hidden from the recommendations for this product.
Good to know
Additionally, you can utilize the shortcode [wt-related-products product_id=XX] to showcase related products on custom posts/pages of your site. ( Replace the XX placeholder in the shortcode with the product ID of the product you are basing the recommendation on. Related product recommendations for the selected product will be displayed on the chosen post/page.)
Also Read
Comments (86)
Benjamin
March 15, 2024
Hello, this works great but I ran the latest plugin update and now it is applying the tag to the related products but not the category and we would like it to apply both at the same time. I have checked the options and both category and tag are ticked.
Arjun
April 1, 2024
Hi Benjamin,
Thank you for reaching out. We weren’t able to replicate this issue. Kindly reach out to our support team for further assistance.
Christos
January 30, 2024
Thank you for your great plugin.
Can it show first the same tag products and if the tag products are less of empty, then show the same category products?
Arjun
February 7, 2024
Hi Christos,
Currently, the plugin doesn’t have the feature you mentioned. However, it can display products from both the same tag and the same category by enabling category and tag in the Globally relate products by option. . If there are no products with the same tag, it will showcase products from the same category.
dave
January 29, 2024
hi, is it possible to remove the price from the related products shown ?
Arjun
January 30, 2024
Hi Dave,
Thank you for reaching out. Yes, you can hide the price from related products section by simply adding the below-mentioned code snippet to your themes functions.php file.
https://gist.github.com/webtoffee-git/0aa2a74de3a407c33e44f87ad8170a33
María
November 9, 2023
Hello, I’ve encountered an issue where the slider is only visible on the cart page and not on the product page. I’ve already enabled the override the theme and attempted to use the short code, but the slider is still not appearing on the product page. Your assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Arjun
November 15, 2023
Hi Maria,
Thank you for reaching out. It appears that the issue is related to a theme conflict. Please contact our support team for further assistance.
erdm
September 18, 2023
Hi,
How can i force related products images to show only 1? Please check below as it shows 2 pictures at least which is not good for UI.
https://www.ediantik.com/antika/efemera/kartpostallar/5-adet-postadan-gecmis-yabanci-kartpostallar-siyah-beyaz-1908-tarihli-kartpostal/
Arjun
September 19, 2023
Hi Erdm,
Thank you for reaching out to us. The plugin only displays one image under related products section. It appears that this issue may be due to a conflict with a third-party plugin. To check this out, kindly deactivate all plugins except our plugin and WooCommerce, Also switching the site theme to any of the WordPress default themes (eg: storefront) is recommended. After doing so, please check if the issue persists. If the problem persists, reach out to our support team for additional assistance.
Erdm
September 19, 2023
problem not solved. Opened a ticket, thanks.
David Willis
August 10, 2023
I have just downloaded Related Products for WooCommerce Version 1.4.9
but can only see the slider on the cart page and not on the product page
can you help me with what I am doing wrong many thanks
Arjun
August 14, 2023
Hi David,
Thank you for getting in touch with us. It appears that your themes template is overriding the related products’ recommendation menu. Please try enabling Override theme’s template option inside the plugin settings.
Peter
July 13, 2023
Hello! Is there a way to make the whole image linked with the product url? Not just the title? Thanks!
Arjun
July 19, 2023
Hi Peter,
Thank you for getting in touch with us. By default, our plugin enables the entire image as a URL. However, the issue you’ve encountered appears to be related to a conflict with your theme. Please reach out to your theme support to find out the cause of the problem.
Chris
May 22, 2023
Is it possible to link related products through a WebToffee/WooCommerce API, versus having to edit products through the WooCommerce web UI?
Arjun
May 26, 2023
Hi Chris,
Thank you for getting in touch with us. We understand your requirement. But currently, our plugin does not support linking related products through API integration.
Maurizio
April 19, 2023
HI,
congratulations for your plugin which is really very well done.
Lately we are having these 2 problems:
1) does not display the related products of the primary category
2) does not exclude “out of stock” products
we can’t use the override theme template setting because it creates graphical issues and displays only 2 related products
our website is
www.dacarelli.itifArjun
April 24, 2023
Hi Maurizio,
Thank you for getting in touch with us. Based on our understanding, the related products section currently visible on your site is part of your theme and not generated by our plugin. This is why the ‘display related products by primary category’ and ‘exclude out of stock’ functionalities are not available. To override your theme’s related products section, you will need to use the “Override theme’s template” feature. We realize that this may not match your current theme, but it is currently the only solution available to hide your theme’s related products section. We appreciate your cooperation and understanding.
Steve
December 13, 2022
Hi.
I would like to display alternate products only if the given product is out of stock.
[The alternatives are lower margin but any sale is better than no sale 🙂 ]
I’m happy with php snippets but can’t work out how to do this?
Any ideas?
Thanks.
Mike
January 3, 2023
Hi Steve,
We understand your requirement. However, the plugin currently doesn’t offer any such options to achieve that requirement. Thanks for understanding.
Anas
December 8, 2022
Hi, Thanks for the plugin!
I would like to exclude category/tag from showing in related products sitewide not per single product. How do I achieve that? Is there a function snippet I can use for this?
Mike
January 11, 2023
Hello Anas,
We understand your requirement. For that, you will need to remove the category/tag from the Globally relate products by section in the plugin settings page and then have to set custom-related product settings for each product via the product edit page > Linked products section.
Melanie
November 29, 2022
Hello!
I’ve set the plugin to only show products from the same category and used youe code snippet to show only products from the same sub-category, but it keeps showing also products with the same tag, which is not what I want.
Also, the custom heading is not working, it keeps saying ‘related products’.
I’ve set the plugin to override the theme settings. My theme is Betheme.
Thank you!
Mike
January 27, 2023
Hi Melanie,
Thanks for reaching out. We couldn’t replicate the mentioned issue with the code snippet. Can you please raise a support ticket via this link by sharing the screenshots of the plugin settings page and the category hierarchy on your site to have a better understanding?
Michel
October 23, 2022
Hi
I am trying to display related products on every product page in the same order as they were entered in the product settings (which is a very specific order for each product). I have tried every sorting options available in the plug-in settings, but to no avail.
I am using Version 1.4.6
Thank you in advance.
Mike
January 27, 2023
Hi Michel,
Thanks for reaching out. We understand your requirement. However presently the plugin doesn’t offer such kind of sorting in the related products section.
saqib khan
October 11, 2022
Hi, can you please help me with the related product slider layout is not working fine for me on my product pages as a slider. it didn’t come in full width with specified products to show. like I define 3 products on desktop and 1 on mobile in the viewport. but it didn’t come that way. here is a link you can check: https://www.nintods.com/product/high-contrast-crochet-rattle-set/ . Please tell me any solution for it.
Mike
October 12, 2022
Hello there,
Since it is more related to the theme that you are using. Kindly share your active theme file as a zip that would be really helpful to debug the issue. You can zip the theme directory(Child theme too if any) and share via this link.
ecstoreweb
September 6, 2022
Thanks for your great plugin.
I’m using swiper slider setting, is it possible to have slider in autoplay mode?
thanks
Mark
September 22, 2022
Hi,
Sorry to let you down, but currently we do not have that option in the plugin.
Denis
August 5, 2022
Hi If I want the related products shown before the product description, how can I do that?
Mike
August 15, 2022
Hi Denis,
Here is the support thread that you can refer to place the related products right after the product.
Blaise
August 1, 2022
Hi,
Is it possible to have 2 Related Products fields on the same page, one filtered by tags and the other one filtered by categories?
Mike
August 17, 2022
Hi Blaise,
We understand your requirement. However, presently or plugin doesn’t offer any such options to display multiple related product sections. Thanks for understanding.
Krishan
July 28, 2022
I have disabled slider,
I want to show products in 2 column in mobile view.
Currently it is showing 1 column only.
Mike
August 25, 2022
Hi Krishan,
Thanks for reaching out. You can use the “Number of products to display on slider per page” option located on the related products settings page to alter the number of products to be displayed based on the device. Hope this setting will help to achieve your requirement.
saqib khan
June 25, 2022
Hey, Thanks for the great plugin of yours, plugin perfectly works on my product page as a slider on desktop. But on mobile devices, it shows the same no. of products in per view. i want to show 1 product slide in mobile. In plugin js, it is defined as breakpoint to show 1 slide in mobile but it is not working can you help, please.
Here is a link to our product page:
http://test.nintods.com/product/clacking-roller/Mike
July 21, 2022
Hi Saqib,
Thanks for reaching out. We have introduced the feature in the latest version (v1.4.4) of our plugin. Kindly update the plugin to the latest version and check. You can enter the number of products to be shown in the slider per view in the plugin settings page according to your need.
Tasos
June 7, 2022
Hello,
I whould like to exclude specific categories from be related others without edit product one by one.
Is this possible?
Shesna
June 8, 2022
Hi Tasos,
We understand the requirement, but our plugin currently does not support this feature. We have added it to the development backlogs.
Lina
May 11, 2022
Hi,
I have installed your Custom Related Products plugin and instead of 4 products, there is only one product displayed on my website. The image is huge and stretched to fit the page.
Thank you.
Shesna
May 12, 2022
Hi Lina,
We understand your query. As it is a site-specific issue, we request you to contact our technical support team for direct assistance.
Katja
April 3, 2022
Hi,
thank you very much for this excellent plugin. It works perfectly on single product pages and displays related products by the product tag. However, I need the same option on all my posts and pages – to display all related products by the product tag. I know I can do with this shortcode:
[wt-related-products product_id=”xx”]
But I would like to display simply ALL products related by the tag automatically. I’ve tried with this
[wt-related-products] simply vomiting the ID, or with this [wt-related-products product_id=””], but it was not such a good idea.
Could you please help me?
Is there any code /short code to display all products related by tag on posts and pages?
Mike
April 19, 2022
Hi,
We understand the requirement, but our plugin currently does not support this feature. We have added it to the development backlogs.
rifa
March 29, 2022
Excuse me, I want to reduce the size of related products in woocommerce, how do I do that?
Alan
April 8, 2022
We have included an option to alter the related product section width in our next release. Please update the plugin upon release to get this option. Thank you for your patience.
Felix Guevarra
March 20, 2022
Hello,
Is there any chance we can customize the whole HTML returned by the shortcode?
[wt-related-products product_id=”xx”]
I want to recreate the repeated HTML, customize the HTML tags on it (based on the static markup that we have)
Thank you for your help! 🙂
Mike
March 24, 2022
Hi Felix,
We understand your requirement. However, presently our plugin doesn’t offer such options to achieve your requirement. Thanks for understanding.
ruby
March 14, 2022
can we change the width of the slider of related products?
Mark
March 18, 2022
Hi Ruby,
You may please modify and use the below style as per your requirement. Copy the code to your active theme’s CSS(Appearance > Customizer > Additional CSS.
.bx-wrapper{max-width: 300px !important;
}
.bx-viewport{
height: 466.562px !important;
}
.crp-slider li{
width: 295px !important;
}
Roelf Woldring
March 8, 2022
Hi
Using the Related Products plug in with Divi Theme
Trying to take control of which related products show up since they are all books or e-learning courses and I want to ensure that only the ‘right’ related products show up
Got the plug in because I don’t want to turn off related products just control it
However, I can’t seem to get it to work
Read though the comments – and there was a similar post
Your folks asked to upload the theme file
Now sure how to do that if you need me to send it to you
Thanks
Roelf
Mike
March 23, 2022
Hi Roelf,
Thanks for reaching out to us. Kindly share the relevant information via this link so that we can look into it.
Iman
March 8, 2022
hi
When I use code snippet. my site accidentally gives an error
pleas help me
this error :
Fatal error: Uncaught Error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<', expecting end of file
in /home/digimedm/domains/digimedmarket.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/child-theme/functions.php on line 45
Call stack:
require_once()
wp-config.php:181
require_once()
wp-load.php:50
require_once()
wp-blog-header.php:13
require()
index.php:18
Mike
March 23, 2022
Hi Iman,
Thanks for reaching out to us. Kindly copy the code file alone
add_filter('wt_crp_subcategory_only', '__return_true');in your active theme’s functions.php file and check.Jantine
February 18, 2022
We use Related Products for WooCommerce with “Custom related products” and enable the slider. But on the frontt of the product page the plugin shows this code:
jQuery(document).ready(function($) { $(‘.bxslider’).bxSlider({ slideWidth: ‘300’, minSlides: ‘3’, maxSlides: ‘3’, moveSlides:1, slideMargin: 10, startSlide: 0, touchEnabled: ‘1’, auto: ”, }); }); ul.products li.product.first { clear: none !important; } .bx-loading { display: none; } .wt-related-products .crp-slider { display: block !important; }
Also de slider does not work.
See this link https://geurenkleurzeist.nl/product/breipakket-shouderdoek-lang-yarns-linello/ as an example.
How do we fix it?
Mark
March 23, 2022
Hi Jantine,
Sorry that we missed the query. Please submit a ticket via support if you are still having any issues.
lee
February 17, 2022
Thanks for great plugin, was looking for some time to find a wat to sort by date as i imported product data from old to new . I sorted the products, using custome > woocomerce > categories new to old, but the related products where showing old to new.
This plugin fixed that, thanks very much 🙂
Chethan hn
January 19, 2022
add_filter(‘wt_crp_subcategory_only’, ‘__return_true’);
this code not working in subcategory
amir
December 13, 2021
Hi,
i want to have related products in 6 columns, not 4. how can i fix this problem?
Mike
January 7, 2022
Hi Amir,
Kindly use this code snippet to achieve your requirement. Also, we can modify the code snippet according to your need.
amir
January 7, 2022
thank you, but how use this code? where should i past that? my theme is woodmart
Mike
January 7, 2022
Hi Amir,
Thanks for getting back to us and we are sorry for the confusion. Kindly copy that code snippet to your active theme’s functions.php (Appearance>Theme Editor>Functions.php) to achieve your requirement.
amir
January 7, 2022
this code doesn’t worked in my website.
my thme is woodmart and my website address is:
datishome.net
John
October 21, 2021
Hi there, Is it possible to centre the heading?
It would be great if we could also sort by price, most sold or review stars 🙂
Mike
October 31, 2021
Hi John,
Thanks for reaching out. Presently our plugin doesn’t offer such options. However, we will keep your suggestion in our development pipeline and consider it in our future updates. Thanks for understanding.
Thorsten
October 19, 2021
Hello,
can you please add the feature to edit the h2 tags for “product name” and the “related headline”
I dont want to have so many h2 tags on my site, the headline should be a div. Would be nice if you can add this feature. Thanks!
Mike
October 31, 2021
Hi Thorsten,
Kindly use this code snippet to your active theme’s functions.php to change the h2 tag on the related product’s heading to div tag.
Regarding the h2 tag in the product name, unfortunately, we have no control over it and is completely loading from the Woocommerce. However, you can go through this thread and alter the code according to your need to achieve it.
Abdul Rahman Mohammed
October 16, 2021
[wt-related-products product_id=”19″]
i want to share the tag instead of product_id=’xx’, kindly help what quote i can use to replacate the bottom
Mike
October 18, 2021
Hi Abdul,
Sorry to let you down, that option is currently unavailable in the plugin. The shortcode only supports ‘product_id’ attribute. But if you have chosen related tags in the product edit page of the product id mentioned on the shortcode, then it will display the related products based on the tag. Thanks for understanding.
Fahim Ahmed
September 13, 2021
Hi,
This plugin is not working for me, after doing all plugin settings as mentioned in Custom Related Products Settings in this article, the default related products are showing on product pages, nothing is changed,
I am using rehub theme and also using a child theme, please suggest how to fix this.
Thanks.
Mike
September 28, 2021
Hi Fahim,
Thanks for reaching out. Kindly share the theme file (including the child theme) via this link to check the issue.
Ashley
August 23, 2021
Hello!
I am so excited that you have added the Order By feature. When I order by date it seems to be ordering from oldest to newest. Is it possible to order from newest to oldest?
Mark
August 27, 2021
Hi Ashley,
We currently do not have the option to alter it. We will add it to backlogs and consider during further development.
maxi
August 20, 2021
having to edit each product is non-sense. Not usefull for me
Mark
August 24, 2021
Hi Maxi,
From version 1.3.7 onwards, you can set related products by category or tags for products globally from the plugin settings itself. This won’t require you to set up the products individualy.
Eli
August 26, 2021
Hi Mark,
I installed the plugin and want it to show related products by category. For some reason the related products are not showing on any product page. Can you please help?
That’s the setting I saved:
https://ibb.co/TBt2KF0Mark
August 27, 2021
Hi Eli,
Please submit a ticket here with the site URL and share the theme zip file as well.
Fahim Ahmed
September 13, 2021
Hi,
Related products plugin is missing in the “Select Plugin” list.
Mark
September 19, 2021
Hi Fahim,
It is the premium version plugin support forum and hence, the Related Products for Woocomerce plugin won’t be in the list. Feel free to revert in comments if you have any doubts regarding the article.
André
August 13, 2021
Hi there,
I use WP-All-Import to specify all my products. Which fields do I use to import related products? Perhaps it is possible to link “custom related products” tot the related products in WooCommerce. Can you help me with this?
Mark
August 15, 2021
Hi Andre,
Please refer the article here for instructions.
Patricia
August 10, 2021
Hello!
Suddenly products are displayed vertically, not horizontally. How can I do?
If you say “install the previous version”, how can I do it? I have the last one.
Thank you for your help!
Best regards!
Mark
August 12, 2021
Hi Patricia,
We can help with the issue. This is likely a theme-related conflict. Please submit a support ticket here including your theme zip file and site URL.
Rosa Lavieri
July 16, 2021
Hi Haritha, I expected that relating by tag, the plugin takes automatically the product tag and relate the product with the same tags.
ok, it is not automatic, so I try to export a product with related tags with your import/export plugin but it not export the meta key generated by Related Products for WooCommerce Plugin. have you a solution to import tags for the plugin? or automate the relation?
thank you
Mark
July 29, 2021
Hi Rosa,
We have added the option to set related products by tag/category globally in the site in the last update. Please install the latest version and check.