Learn How to Easily Remove Your Shop Page Sorting Options in WooCommerce

Sometimes you just need a simple fix. Something bugs you and will confuse your shoppers, but the solution is just not built into the WooCommerce core. Such is the case with the sorting options on your shop page.

If we go back into our WooCommerce settings > products > display, we find that we can set the Default Product Sorting but that doesn’t let us remove anything.

Removing One or More of the Sorting Options

For my recent shop page I wanted to remove some of these options for a specific reason. I lucked out when I discovered the WooCommerce Remove Product Sorting plugin from my friends over at Skyverge. And yes, it’s even free—and simple to use.

Install, activate and you can add any of the options to remove them from your shop page.

In this example, I removed the Popularity option.

Adding a Sort Alphabetically Option

I discovered this plugin when I was creating a shop page. But there was one hangup. There was no option that I wanted to use as a default because I wanted them to be listed alphabetically. A roundabout way would have been to change all my publish dates on my products, but what a pain in the butt that would have been.

After some googling, I came to the realization that my only option was to add a code snippet I found. Yes, code. Something I tend to stay away from but in certain instances, it’s the only fix.

After adding this to my functions.php file, I got what I needed.

add_filter( 'woocommerce_get_catalog_ordering_args', 'sv_alphabetical_woocommerce_shop_ordering' );

function sv_custom_woocommerce_catalog_orderby( $sortby ) {
 $sortby['alphabetical'] = 'Sort by name: alphabetical';
 return $sortby;
 }
 add_filter( 'woocommerce_default_catalog_orderby_options', 'sv_custom_woocommerce_catalog_orderby' );
 add_filter( 'woocommerce_catalog_orderby', 'sv_custom_woocommerce_catalog_orderby' );

Scary? Yes, but it worked as you can see. In fact, I added the Sort by.

Warning, Warning, Warning!

If you have added code before to your functions.php file and want to do this, you have my blessings. But if you haven’t done it before, please get someone to help you. And if you do happen to be the adventurous type, make sure to back up before you do anything, just in case your site explodes.