Showing Products When No Products Can Be Found
Isn’t the title a bit confusing? I really had no idea about how to explain what this article is about exactly without writing a title that is 20k characters long.
So, let’s try to explain what it is about here.
If a potential customer on your site tries to search for a product it may happen that they won’t find anything. Maybe because the keyword used is too specific, or maybe just because you don’t have what they want. They will land on a page with a message telling them that no products can be found.
How can you try to sell something anyway from that page?
Showing Products When Nothing Else Can Be Found
What we want to do here is to show some products for the customer when no other products can be found.
You may want to show your featured products or just some random products. In this case, we’ll show the 4 most recent products.
So, open the file functions.php in wp-content/themes/your-child-theme-name/ and add this code at the end of the file:
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| add_action( 'woocommerce_no_products_found', 'show_products_on_no_products_found', 20 ); | |
| function show_products_on_no_products_found() { | |
| echo '<h2>' . __( 'You may be interested in…', 'domain' ) . '</h2>'; | |
| echo do_shortcode( '[recent_products per_page="4"]' ); | |
| } |
This code is pretty clear. It prints the title You may be interested in… and then a list of four products. You can increase the number of products shown of course, but I’d suggest to not print too many.
Are you wondering how it looks? Here is a screenshot of my local test site with Storefront:
Searching for a keyword does not return any result, but the most four recent products are shown.
If you want to show some other kind of products, you can have a look at the shortcodes available in WooCommerce.
Thank you for another valuable nugget. Would this show up on the 404 Page Not Found template?
Not really Amit, WooCommerce does not have a 404 page. The 404 page is from the theme.
This shows when you search for a product and there’s none. It’s still kind of a 404 page, but not really.
Any suggestion how to make it show up in 404 since our client’s site is only a shop. No blog.
You can simply use the content of the function from the snippet directly into your 404.php template, where you want the products to appear.