“Uncategorized” product category still showing after 3.3.1

If empty, most plugins/themes will hide it. WooCommerce hides it by default on archives if you choose to list categories.

You can rename it, but it cannot de deleted.

Hmmm. But we didn’t have that category showing at all in the settings or on our website before updating to 3.3. So was the category added in that update?

Yes, a default category was added so all products get a category. This is similar to how posts have a default category.

Ok. Now it makes sense. And I was able to hide the category on our shop page with making the “uncategorized” category a subcategory and then hiding all the subcategories. I don’t know if there’s a bigger (must have) reason to have a default category like that, but would very much appreciate if it could be deleted in the future updates ??

It makes filtering easier in the backend for one ?? Glad you worked it out.

its a easy one, just hide it with css, .cat-item-#your cat number#{display:none}

for example mine is

.cat-item-231{display:none}

all sorted dirty fix but easy fix.

Thanks b2nmusic. Hiding via CSS works. Unfortunately, the official WooCommerce answer does not.

I don’t seem to have category numbers just names, any suggestions

Hi Guys,
I solved it after looking around and could not really figure it our at first too. No css, or any codes into functions.php or anything else was working and then, after reading the woocommerce guys explanation it clicked the solution is actually very simple, here it is:
Most of us have product categories assigned right, so either choose the least products in a given category and if 0 products even better, just recreate the category in editing the Uncategorized category with the same details as the already existing. If you have to re-add products then that is what you have to do. That is the least invasive solution.
Sorry that there is no better solution, but with this you have removed all showing up of Uncategorized category on front page anywhere, just recreate an existing one by editing Uncategorized category ??

Thanks @tomas2017, but what if you have hundreds–or thousands—of products?

@lbollom – here’s how you can find the category number:

1) Edit the ‘uncategorized’ category
2) Look at the URL. You will find “ID=###” in the string. Take note of the numbers in place of ###. That is your category number.

Then you can use @b2nmusic’s CSS solution:
.cat-item-###{display:none}

In this CSS snippet, replace ### with the category ID number.

Thanks @tomas2017 and @theprofessor101. Yours solutions are working well.

No matter what I try I cannot hide the empty category. I have used @tomas2017 solution for now, however none of the css snippets work to hide the category (I have changed the numbers to my post ID). I even tried adding a snippet I found to functions.php but no luck.

Is it the case then, that if you were to start a new shop you should name this category as your first category then continue from there. I can see how this is good as it means there is always at least one category but its a bit of an annoyance if you run a shop with hundreds of products and sub-cat in each category, when you suddenly end up with a random category that you need to fill. Especially when you run 4 web stores and now have to deal with customers calling up to say their shop is looking funny

They simply need to add a back-end option to hide categories. Seems absurd. I renamed the category and replaced products as tomas2017 said.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by richpaine.

I am going to try the CSS solution, but my real problem is that WooCommerce (or WordPress?) keeps adding more and more products to that Uncategorized category. I deleted a couple hundred and got it down to zero, and then 1600 magically became added. All of those products already have a category, so the process isn’t making any sense to me. I’m not sure, but I think every time I add a new Product Set, it does see the Category I assign, and it includes the products in that category, but it also adds them to Uncategorized.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by zimshah.

On the widget I use to display the catagories there is an option to hide empty catagories. I am using the Merchandiser theme.