WooCommerce Categories Ultra Widget
WooCommerce Categories Ultra Widget – Category navigation that shoppers actually use.
WooCommerce Categories Ultra Widget is an AJAX-powered category widget for WooCommerce that displays your product categories and sub categories, with product counts, in a compact accordion that shoppers can expand and collapse without ever reloading the page. It has been in continuous development since October 2014 and is styled entirely from the WordPress Customizer with live preview.
Category navigation is the most used element in a WooCommerce sidebar and also the one most often left as an unstyled default list. On stores with any real depth of catalogue, the standard product categories widget quickly becomes an unmanageable wall of links, and on mobile it pushes the actual products so far down the page that visitors give up. WooCommerce Categories Ultra Widget solves both problems: parent categories stay collapsed until a shopper wants to see what is inside them, and the whole widget can be hidden or converted into a dropdown on small screens.
AJAX expand and collapse, no page reloads
Sub categories load and reveal through AJAX, so a shopper exploring your catalogue structure never triggers a full page load. They can open one parent category, look at its children, collapse it and open another, all in place. That keeps them on the page they are already browsing and makes deep catalogues feel far less like work to navigate.
There is also an auto open option that is genuinely useful for discovery. When a visitor lands on a parent category page, that category’s children can be shown open automatically beneath it. The shopper immediately sees the narrower categories available to them rather than having to guess that they exist and click to find out.
WooCommerce Categories Ultra Widget product counts and ordering
Show the number of products in each category directly beside its name so shoppers know before clicking whether a category is worth exploring. It is a small detail that measurably reduces dead-end clicks on stores where some categories are thinly stocked.
Categories can be ordered by name or by the category order you have already set in WooCommerce, so the widget respects the merchandising decisions you made in your product data rather than forcing an alphabetical list on you. Any category you do not want in the widget can be excluded by ID, one or several at a time, which is the simple way to keep internal or seasonal categories out of public navigation.
Built for mobile
Long category lists are a real problem on phones. This widget gives you two ways out of it. You can hide the widget entirely on mobile devices, or you can switch it to display as a dropdown so the entire category tree collapses into a single control that takes up one line instead of thirty. Either way, mobile shoppers reach your products without endless scrolling past navigation.
Full styling control in the Customizer
Every visual aspect of the widget is set from the WordPress Customizer, under its own Ultra Widget menu, with live preview. Change something on the left and you see the result on the right immediately, with no saving and refreshing to check your work.
There are separate style panels for the container, the parent item text and the child item text. Set fonts, sizes, weights, colours and spacing for each level independently, and define hover colours so the widget matches the rest of your theme rather than looking like a plugin bolted onto it. Google Fonts are available alongside the standard web-safe set. If you would rather not touch code, you never have to.
WooCommerce Categories Ultra Widget Compatibility and maintenance
WooCommerce Categories Ultra Widget requires WordPress 6.5 or higher, WooCommerce 8.0 or higher and PHP 7.4 or higher, and has been tested up to WordPress 6.7.2 and WooCommerce 9.7.0. It is fully compatible with WooCommerce HPOS custom order tables, 100% WPML compatible and translation ready.
The plugin is actively maintained. The codebase was refactored to Composer with autoloading for faster, cleaner PHP, and recent releases have focused on security hardening, including full sanitisation and validation of Customizer styling values both before they are saved and again before they are output. Every WordPress and WooCommerce major release is tested for compatibility. The complete release history is public in the changelog.
Setup
Install the plugin from your a3 Dashboard under WooCommerce Plugins, activate it, then go to Appearance > Widgets and drop the Product Categories Ultra Widget into any widget area. All the display options live in the widget itself, and a direct link inside the widget takes you straight to the Customizer for styling. Full instructions with screenshots are in the WooCommerce Categories Ultra Widget documentation.
Works well alongside
Category navigation is one part of how shoppers find products. Pair this widget with WooCommerce Feature Category Widget to promote specific categories with images on your home page, and with WooCommerce Product Sort and Display Premium to give shoppers control over how products are sorted once they land in a category. Predictive Search Premium for WooCommerce covers the shoppers who prefer to search rather than browse, and WooCommerce Quick View Ultimate lets them check a product without leaving the category listing they worked to reach.
