WooCommerce Shortcode : A Simple Guide

WooCommerce shortcodes still work, but they’re not the recommended way to build store pages anymore — WooCommerce itself now points people to the Products/Cart/Checkout blocks for anything new. Shortcodes are worth knowing for two real cases: maintaining an older site that already uses them, and dropping a product grid or add-to-cart button inside a page-builder text element (Fusion Builder, Elementor) where a native block doesn’t fit cleanly.

[products] — the one you’ll actually use

Displays a product grid with real filtering control. The attributes that matter:

• limit — number of products (defaults to -1, meaning all)
• columns — grid columns (defaults to 4)
• category — category slug to filter by
• orderby — date, id, menu_order, popularity, rand, rating, or title
• order — ASC or DESC

[products limit="8" columns="4" category="t-shirts" orderby="date" order="DESC"]

[woocommerce_cart] and [woocommerce_checkout]

These aren’t meant to be dropped into arbitrary pages — WooCommerce expects them on the specific pages assigned under WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → Page setup (Cart page and Checkout page). WooCommerce auto-inserts these shortcodes when it creates those pages during setup; if you’ve deleted or rebuilt your cart/checkout page and it’s showing blank or broken, check that the page still contains the shortcode and is still assigned correctly in that settings screen — a common cause of a broken checkout is a page builder stripping the shortcode when the page was edited visually.

Newer WooCommerce sites should use the Cart and Checkout blocks instead, which WooCommerce now treats as the default and actively develops. Stick with the shortcode version only if you have a specific reason to (a legacy customization built against it, or a plugin that hooks into the shortcode-based cart/checkout template).

[woocommerce_my_account]

Renders the customer’s account dashboard (orders, addresses, downloads, logout). Like cart/checkout, this is normally already placed on the page assigned as “My account” in WooCommerce’s page setup — you generally won’t need to add it manually unless you’re rebuilding that page from scratch.

Other product-listing shortcodes

[featured_products], [sale_products], [best_selling_products], [top_rated_products], and [recent_products] are all thin wrappers around the same underlying product-query logic as [products], pre-filtered for their specific case. They take most of the same attributes (limit, columns, orderby). In practice, if you need more than one of these on a site, it’s usually cleaner to use [products] with explicit orderby/on_sale filtering so you’re not juggling five slightly-different shortcodes with inconsistent attribute support.

When shortcodes still make sense

On an Avada/Fusion Builder site, the practical case for shortcodes is dropping one into a Fusion Text or Code element when you want a product grid inside a builder layout that doesn’t have a clean native WooCommerce block equivalent for that spot. For anything else — a standalone shop page, a simple product showcase — use the WooCommerce blocks instead; they’re what WooCommerce is actively maintaining and improving, and shortcodes are increasingly the legacy path.