PrestaShop empty categories and categories without a description: a checklist
PrestaShop empty categories are pages with no products or no text at all, left behind after an import, a season or a range change. You find them in the category tree by comparing product counts and descriptions. Fill each empty category, merge it with a neighbouring one or disable it with a redirect. Give categories without a description a few sentences for the customer.
Author: The TellMyShop team. A guide for PrestaShop store owners: the cause, the manual fix and the same work in a chat conversation.
Last updated: · 6 min read
Where empty categories come from
Empty categories are rarely created on purpose. Most often they are a trace of something that happened in the store earlier:
- An import from a supplier file. The import creates categories from a column in the file, and then some products end up elsewhere or are disabled.
- The season. A Winter sale or Mother's Day gifts category is left without products after the season.
- A change in your range. A brand withdrew a product line, and the category stayed.
- Rebuilding the tree. Products were moved to new categories, and the old ones were left empty. We cover moving products in the post on moving products to another category.
Categories without a description are a separate case. They have products, but there is not a single sentence above the list. A customer from Google lands on a grid of photos and doesn't know how this category differs from the one next to it.
Checklist: reviewing categories step by step
Work through the list from the top. The first steps give you the overall picture, the later ones decide about each category.
- List all categories with their number of active products. Mark those with zero and those with one or two products.
- Check whether a category with zero has subcategories with products. A parent category may have no products of its own and that is fine, as long as the customer sees the subcategories in it.
- For each empty category, check whether it is in the menu and whether anyone has visited it. You can check traffic in Search Console or in the store's statistics.
- Decide about each empty category using the table below.
- List the categories with products but without a description. Start with those with the most products and traffic.
- Check the titles and descriptions for Google in the categories. Empty meta fields are the second most common gap.
- After the changes, check the menu and the addresses of disabled categories. Every old address with traffic should lead to where the customer will find similar products.
The PrestaShop user guide describes the tree and category fields in the part on managing categories in version 8. In version 9 the same part is in the chapter on managing the catalog.
What to do with each empty category
| Category state | What to do | What to watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Empty, products will be back this season | keep it, assign products when they arrive | take it out of the menu during the gap |
| Empty, a similar category next to it has products | merge: move the description, disable the old one, redirect the address | redirect to a category, not the home page |
| Empty, the topic won't come back | disable it and redirect if it had traffic | leave deleting until the end, after checking |
| One or two products | merge with the parent or add products from other categories | a product can be in several categories at once |
| Parent category with no products of its own | keep it, add a description and subcategories at the top of the page | the customer must see straight away where to click |
| Products present, no description | write a few sentences for the customer | no keyword lists and no wholesaler text |
In its guide to ecommerce site structure, Google says it judges how important a page is by the links in menus and categories. So an empty category in the menu wastes space that a category with products could use.
A disabled category returns an error at its address. Google's help on 404 errors advises redirecting only to a page with similar content, not to the home page, because such a redirect confuses customers and the search engine. When the category had traffic, set a redirect to the closest category. More on this in the post on 404 errors in PrestaShop. While you are at it, read when it is worth assigning a product to several categories, because that is often the simplest way to fill a small category.
What to write in a category without a description
A category description answers the question of a customer who has just landed there: is this what I am looking for. Two or three sentences above the list are enough: what is here, who it is for, how the products differ. Put a longer text with advice below the product list, so it doesn't push the products down the screen. We cover the details in the guide on the category description in PrestaShop.
How the chat reviews your categories
Reviewing a tree with several hundred categories by hand takes many evenings of clicking. With the TellMyShop module you ask your chat (Claude or ChatGPT) for it, one sentence is enough.
You: Review the categories. Which ones are empty and which have no description?
Your chat: The store has 64 categories. 7 have no active products, including 3 seasonal ones from last winter. 19 have products but no description. A suggestion for the Winter jackets category:
You: Write the descriptions in this style. Leave the empty seasonal ones.
Your chat: I'll prepare a preview for the 19 categories in one batch. I'll save it after your ‘yes’. The empty seasonal categories stay as they are.
Card status: waiting for your “yes”old version: (no description)
new version: Women's and men's winter jackets: down jackets, parkas and softshells. For each one we give its waterproof rating and the temperature it keeps you warm down to.
The numbers and description in the example are illustrative. The chat takes facts from the products in the category. When the products don't give a piece of information, it doesn't make it up.
In the free TellMyShop Free the chat shows the category tree with product counts and missing descriptions, and suggests a cleanup plan. It saves nothing. In TellMyShop Pro it writes and saves descriptions and meta data for up to 20 categories at once, creates and moves categories, assigns products and sets redirects. These are the Content and SEO and Catalogue areas, which work straight after licence activation, with no extra switches. Request examples are in the use cases category tree audit, SEO texts for category pages and new categories with products moved into them.
Every batch has a preview and goes into the change history. You can undo most changes with one instruction. Plans are on the pricing page.
Questions and answers
Do empty categories harm a store?
Above all they harm the customer, who clicks in the menu and lands on a page with no products. For Google such a page has little content and may not make it into results. A single empty category is a small thing, several dozen is a mess in the store's structure.
How can I quickly find empty categories in PrestaShop?
In the admin you can go through the tree in Catalog → Categories, but you check the number of products category by category. It is quicker to ask the chat with the TellMyShop module: the category tree with product counts and missing descriptions is available in the free version.
Should I delete an empty category or disable it?
Disable it first. Disabling is easy to reverse, while deleting also erases the description and settings. If the category had traffic from Google, add a redirect from its address to the closest category.
How much text does a category description need?
Google gives no minimum word count. The description should help the customer choose: what is in the category, how the products differ, what to look out for. A few sentences above the product list and a bit more below it are usually enough.
Will the chat write category descriptions by itself?
In TellMyShop Pro, yes. The chat reads the products in the category, shows a sample, then a preview of the whole batch of up to 20 categories at once. It saves after your “yes”, and every change goes into the change history.
PrestaShop is a registered trademark of PrestaShop SA. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic PBC. ChatGPT and OpenAI are trademarks of OpenAI. TellMyShop is not affiliated with these companies.