WooCommerce product attributes, categories and tags: what each one is for

Category, tag or attribute: what goes where?

A category answers “what am I looking for”, an attribute answers “what should it be like”, and a tag answers “what else does it go with”. WooCommerce calls all three product taxonomies and describes them in its documentation on categories, tags and attributes.

The most common problem in stores that grew without a plan is features entered as categories. A “Black hoodies” category next to “Hoodies” and “Black” gives three pages with almost the same products. The customer gets lost, and Google sees pages competing with each other.

Example: a clothing store from scratch

The store sells hoodies, trousers and jackets for women and men. Here is a structure that scales well.

1. Categories: two levels. At the top Women and Men, under them Hoodies, Trousers, Jackets. Each product in one, the deepest category. You can read more about the category tree in the post on moving products to another category.
2. Global attributes for filters and variations. Size (XS to XXL), Colour (black, navy, grey, beige), Material (cotton, polyester, wool). Size and colour will also be used for variations.
3. Global attributes for description only. Fit (regular, oversize), Country of origin. Visible on the product page in the Additional information tab, they do not have to be in the filters.
4. Tags, sparingly. “Gift for her”, “Autumn 2026 collection”. Only where they link products from different categories and you plan to promote them.
5. Custom attributes for exceptions. A feature that appears in one or two products does not need its own global attribute.

Keep value names in one form. “Navy”, “navy blue” and “dark blue” are three different colours for WooCommerce and three entries in the filter. When a filter shows odd results, see the post on why WooCommerce filters are not working. It also explains how to enable an attribute in the filters.

When should an attribute have its own page, and when not?

A global attribute can get its own archive, a page along the lines of “all wool products”. You turn this on in the attribute settings with the archives option. For Material in a clothing store that is often a good idea, because people search for “wool jumper”. For Size usually not, because a page with “everything in size M” helps nobody in Google. How to show such archives in the menu is described in the developer documentation on attributes in menus and archives.

Attributes help outside the store too. Google reads colour, size and material from the product page data and from the product feed, as it describes in its guide to product structured data. The more consistently features are described, the less work you have with shopping campaigns.

Be careful with variations. Leave an attribute your variations are built from alone until you know what will happen to each variation. How WooCommerce puts a variable product together is covered in the post on WooCommerce product variations.

How does the chat tidy up attributes across many products?

With five products, the editor is enough. With three hundred hoodies where the material is written once in the description, once as a custom attribute and once not at all, it means many evenings of opening products one by one.

The TellMyShop plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce connects your store to your chat (Claude or ChatGPT). In TellMyShop Free the chat reads the list of global and custom attributes with the number of products, finds duplicates such as “Colour” and “colour” and typos in values, and suggests a clean-up plan. It saves nothing.

In TellMyShop Pro the same conversations end with a change. The chat sets attributes in batches of up to 50 products, assigns categories and tags and creates new categories. On request it adds missing values to a global attribute, for example a new colour. Content and catalogue changes work straight after licence activation, with no switches to turn on.