Plan useful product filters
A useful filter system starts with clean product data. This guide helps store owners decide which product properties should become filters before configuring POM's Advanced Filters.
Start with buying decisions
List the questions customers use to narrow the catalog, such as size, material, capacity, compatibility, category, or price. Add a filter only when it changes a meaningful buying decision and enough published products contain that data.
Avoid turning internal labels, supplier codes, or rarely populated fields into customer-facing controls.
Choose the correct product data source
- Use Product categories for a browsable hierarchy.
- Use WooCommerce global attributes for reusable characteristics such as size or color.
- Use a product taxonomy when a structured product property needs its own archive and terms.
- Use price filtering for numeric product prices.
- Use keyword search for product titles and searchable product content.
Do not use free-text product descriptions as a substitute for consistent attributes or taxonomy terms.
Prepare the catalog
- Open Products → Categories and simplify duplicate or ambiguous category branches.
- Open Products → Attributes and create global attributes needed across products.
- Assign terms consistently to published products and variations where appropriate.
- Check translated term names and slugs on multilingual stores.
- Review out-of-stock and catalog-visibility rules.
- Browse each relevant archive before adding its filter.
Expected result: every intended filter source has clear labels and a representative set of matching products.
Design the filter set
Put broad, commonly used choices first. Keep labels short and use customer vocabulary. Do not repeat the current archive context unnecessarily; POM can suppress a taxonomy filter when the visitor is already viewing that same taxonomy archive.
On product-category archives, category navigation can expose direct child categories. Build category depth deliberately so the choices remain understandable.
Configure and test
After preparing the data, go to Settings → POM Theme → E-Commerce → Storefront → Advanced filters settings and add the required search, price, category, attribute, or product-taxonomy filters.
Test individual and combined selections, clearing, no-results behavior, browser Back, pagination, and mobile opening and closing. Repeat after changing product terms or visibility.
Signs the model needs correction
Review the product data when:
- a visible filter has no options;
- two terms mean the same thing;
- most products lack a value;
- selections lead mainly to no results;
- customers must understand an internal naming convention;
- translated catalogs show a different structure.
Correcting the catalog model is more durable than hiding inconsistencies with layout or CSS.