Auto setup: making plain-text product details filterable

Last updated July 10, 2026

Why some product details cannot filter

A product detail can be stored two ways in WooCommerce, and only one of them can power a filter:

• As a selectable option (WooCommerce calls these global attributes with terms): the product is linked to a shared option like “April” that other products can share. Filters, counts, and the sidebar all work from these.
• As plain text: the words “April” are simply typed onto the product. It displays fine on the product page, but nothing connects one product’s “April” to another’s – so a filter has nothing to count or narrow by.

A grayed-out row on the Settings tab means most or all of your products store that detail as plain text. The row is shown so you can see what your catalog could offer, but it is not a real filter until the data changes. The Auto setup tab exists to make that change for you.

Auto setup: scan, approve, done

1. Scan my catalog sweeps every product and finds details stored as plain text. Each finding shows how many products carry it, how many options it would offer shoppers, and example values pulled from your real products, ranked by impact.
2. Approve – make filterable converts that detail across the catalog: the typed text becomes real shared options (creating the attribute and its options as needed), in small batches with a live progress bar. Product pages keep looking exactly the same; only the storage changes.
3. When a conversion finishes, the filter group is turned on automatically and appears in the sidebar. Visit the Settings tab to drag it into the order you want.

Approving is safe to interrupt: nothing is lost, and clicking Approve again resumes where it stopped. One conversion runs at a time. A few hundred products finish in about a minute; a few thousand take 20 to 30 minutes with the progress bar keeping you posted.

The scan also re-runs itself whenever you open the tab after the catalog has changed – imports, products added or edited by hand – and marks proposals that are new since the previous scan.

Judging which proposals to approve

• Options it would offer: a detail with a handful of tidy values (Gold, Rose Gold, Silver) makes an excellent group. A detail with hundreds of unique values (measurements, weights) is usually free text – converting it is harmless but the group would read like a data dump, so spend your approvals on the tidy ones first.
• Examples: up to six actual values from your catalog. Tidy, repeating values signal a strong filter group; messy or numeric ones signal free text.
• Products: the reach of the fix – how much of your catalog becomes filterable when you approve.

Imports keep it filterable

If SWPL Product Import runs your feeds, approving a conversion also updates the matching attribute rows in your import profiles automatically (the completion note names the profiles it touched), so future feed runs keep storing that detail the filterable way. Other importers need their equivalent of an “attribute with terms” setting ticked by hand – in WP All Import style tools, that is the Attributes section’s taxonomy option plus auto-created terms.

The coverage tools

The coverage report

Run it from the Auto setup tab. Each row is a category (two levels deep) with its product count, the enabled groups that actually work there (with how many options each offers), and the enabled groups that have nothing to offer those products. Use it to judge where converting a detail matters: a group missing across your busiest categories is worth an Approve; one missing only on a tiny category may not be.

The coverage checker (browse-your-shop mode)

Turn it on and browse your shop the way a customer would. On every category or filtered page, a small box – visible only to logged-in shop managers, never to shoppers – reads the actual products on that page and reports which groups can filter there, which details those products carry only as plain text, and which details are the same on every product shown (nothing to choose between). It reads whatever page you are on, so narrowing first tells you about exactly that slice. On a headless storefront, use “Open manager view on the storefront” in the Headless storefront section instead, since you are not logged into WordPress while browsing there. Leave it off day to day; it is a discovery tool, not a shopper feature.

Conversion history

Every Approve is recorded when it completes: the time, the detail converted, and the result – including which import profiles were updated. The last 50 entries are kept.

One warning

Converting a large existing catalog is a bulk data change. It is designed to be safe – the storage changes, the product pages do not – but plan it deliberately, and if you have a staging copy, try the first big conversion there.