The top 7 plugins to use for configurable products on your WooCommerce store (2023)

If you offer products with personalization and customization, you can give your customers the opportunity to own something unique. However, there aren’t many ways in a default WordPress installation to do this on your own site. Instead, you’ll want to employ a WooCommerce configurable product plugin. The good news is that there are lots available to choose from.

While WooCommerce does let you use custom fields to carry out some customization, it’s a limited piece of functionality that a plugin can improve on. This will let you design your products around the needs of the customer, which can boost your sales and keep them coming back.

For this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to use our favorite WooCommerce configurable product plugin. What’s more, we’ll take a look at a number of options. First, let’s talk more about why you’d want to offer customized product lines.

TLDR: find the best configurator plugin for your store

Not feeling like reading a 2,000 word blog post? No problem! We built a tool you can use to determine which configurator plugin is the right fit for your WooCommerce products. Select the features you need, and our tool comes up with the best plugins for your specific needs. Use it here:

Why would you want to offer personalized products?

A personalized, configurable, or variable product is one that comes with variations. For example, you might provide different colors of garments, with varying graphics. However, you can extrapolate from this to almost any other product you offer.

There are lots of benefits for using variable products too:

• First off, you can personalize the shopping experience for the customer. The positives can be an increase in trust, sales, loyalty, and more.
• You’re able to stand out from your competition, especially if you choose to offer unique customizations customers can’t find elsewhere.
• If you measure your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV,) you might see this improve based on repeated sales and returns.

On the whole, WooCommerce configurable products can raise your income, return customers, the overall User Experience (UX) and more. Given that 80 percent of polled consumers make purchases based on the configuration available, it’s a smart idea to offer this on your own e-commerce store.

How do you create WooCommerce configurable products?

In order to create configurable products, you’ll need to access WooCommerce’s functionality. This isn’t as straightforward as you might like. For example, you’re able to add product attributes within a default setup:

However, this doesn’t cover any variable element of your products. Instead, you’ll need to use a dedicated WordPress plugin to bridge the gap. There are lots available, but not all offer the same blend of features and functionality.

Across the next few sections, we’ll dive into some of the more popular plugins on the market. Let’s take a closer look.

The top 7 plugins to use for configurable products on your WooCommerce store (2022)

Over the rest of the article, we’re going to take a look at 7 different WooCommerce configurable product plugins. Afterwards, we’ll show you how to use our favorite one.

1. Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce

First off, let’s introduce Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce. This plugin lets you add custom fields to your online store without fuss.

This straightforward WooCommerce configurable product plugin has a design to suit those who don’t code, while providing the same level of functionality and versatility of a coded solution.

There are a number of ways the plugin can help your customers tailor purchases to their needs:

• At its core, the plugin can let you add extra product fields to enable customers to personalize a product. For example, they could add a name, color choice, wrapping style, further details, and much more.
• You’re able to use a variety of field types in order to break up the selection. For instance, you can use checkboxes, drop-down menus, and many more types.
• You can even add color swatches, images, date pickers, and other variants to help your customers personalize their selections.
• The customer can edit cart options directly from the cart page, which helps to stop them from leaving your store.

In addition, Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce has a number of other explicitly compatible WordPress themes and plugins. If you need more from the plugin, there are also lots of add-ons available to enhance the functionality. This lets you offer pre-filled fields, layered images, and even live previews:

Licenses for the plugin start from $59 per year, although there are lifetime licenses available too. What’s more, each purchase comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

2. WooCommerce Product Configurator

IconicWPs WooCommerce Product Configurator is all about the visuals. It uses layered images to create your various product configurations, from the WordPress dashboard.

It has an easy setup process, looks fantastic on all screen sizes, and will work with almost any WordPress theme and WooCommerce. The plugin has 2 primary focuses:

• The ability to manage product variations using layered PNG files. This lets you change up each customization in the preview pane and save time creating product images. What’s more, you can add a new variant using attributes and an extra PNG layer.
• You’re able to customize your stock for each configuration too. It’s a quick way to see how your stock levels fare at a glance.

WooCommerce Product Configurator costs $79 per year for a single-site license. However, you won’t have as much flexibility as Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce. This plugin focuses on using PNG layers and does away with other (subjectively superfluous) options.

3. Composite Products

While the default WooCommerce setup doesn’t allow for configurable products, there is a first-party extension for the platform in Composite Products.

As the name suggests, this WooCommerce extension lets the customer create a product from various different parts that you specify. You have a lot of scope here, and plenty of features in the box:

• You can customize the flow and layout of your composite product to include checkboxes, images, drop-down menus, and much more.
• You’re able to bring in conditional logic functionality to help streamline the purchase for the customer.
• There are powerful product grouping options available, so you can ensure products with similar configurations have consistency.

For $99 per year, you can integrate Composite Products with your other WooCommerce extensions. However, much like WooCommerce Product Configurator, it does one thing well but might not have the versatility you need from a WooCommerce configurable product plugin.

4. Yith Composite Products for WooCommerce

YITH develops a lot of different extensions, but with Composite Products for WooCommerce, it offers a similar experience to the ‘official’ WooCommerce extension.

At its core, the plugin will let the customer create a product from various parts. However, the way it does this comes with many different features and elements:

• There is flexibility in how you show the composite components for each product: 2 types of lists, and a stepped style.
• What’s more, you can show the product list in a few different ways, depending on your needs.
• You have the ability to set mandatory components and auto-select unique components in the list. You’re even able to make a component exclusive to a certain product.

There’s plenty more in the box with Composite Products for WooCommerce, and for $99.99 per year, it can be yours. On the flip side to the positives, it also suffers from the narrow focus of other plugins on this list, so that’s something to bear in mind if you want to use a WooCommerce configurable product plugin.

5. Yith WooCommerce Product Add-Ons & Extra Options

If you need to offer more than YITHs Composite Products extension can provide, their WooCommerce Product Add-Ons & Extra Options plugin could be the ticket.

This has a different ‘flavor’ than their composite products offering, with a wider scope for applications. Here’s what it can provide:

• You’ll take a core product, and provide fields for the customer to select further options. This could be simple (such as color options), or it can have greater complexity. The demo page shows how you can adapt the extension to computer parts, food, offering services, and much more.
• There is a large library of elements, such as text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, color swatches, date pickers, upload dialogs, and much more.
• You’ll find basic logic functionality within the plugin too – these are more ‘dependency rules’ than conditional logic though.

This WooCommerce extension from YITH does something different to their other plugin, but it still doesn’t give you the overall flexibility of Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce. Moreover, we found it can slow down your site, so keep that in mind.

6. WooCommerce Extra Product Options

The WooCommerce Extra Product Options plugin has a lot of sales, and good user feedback. This, coupled with a rich feature set, means it might be a WooCommerce configurable product plugin to consider.

This plugin lets you set additional product options, but it does so in a different way to other plugins on the market:

• You’ll use a drag-and-drop builder to create your product options.
• You’re able to create templates that you can use for other products on your WordPress website.
• There’s conditional logic built into the plugin.
• You get to choose whether your options display in a typical way on the product page, or you can use pop-ups and sliders.

WooCommerce Extra Product Options gives you a lot for $49, although this only comes as a single-site license and 6 months of support and updates. You might be better off paying more money and having a longer support period, or obtaining more licenses for your sites.

7. WooCommerce Product Add-Ons

In contrast to WooCommerce’s Composite Products extension, the Product Add-Ons plugin fills in the blanks. This is a simple solution that lets you offer optional extras at checkout.

This plugin gives you a straightforward array of ways to place add-ons on product pages. As such, the feature set is focused on this aspect:

• You’ll use the familiar WooCommerce metaboxes to add in checkboxes, text areas, custom price fields, product images, and more to your product pages.
• You’re able to set flat fees regardless of how many products a customer orders, or work with quality-based and percentage-based pricing.
• As with all of the other first-party WooCommerce extensions, you have as near guaranteed compatibility as you could expect from a plugin.

WooCommerce Product Add-Ons costs less than Composite Products, at $49 per year. Even so, the reviews and ratings from other users are not fantastic. Despite high compatibility, you may want to take a look at other plugins with better user feedback and greater flexibility.

How do you use the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin?

In our final section, we’re going to show you how to use Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce – albeit a brief, whistle-stop tour. First, you’ll install the plugin in a typical way for a premium solution. Once you activate the plugin, you’ll spot a Product fields tab within the WooCommerce → Settings page:

While the plugin is ready to roll out of the box, you can adjust a number of settings here to your tastes. For example, you can choose to show custom fields on the cart or checkout pages, enable editing from the cart, and show product price hints.

There are also a few other options for AJAX loading (which will improve performance in some cases,) and the labels your custom fields will use, among others. This process should take no more than a minute or two, at which point you can begin to use the plugin.

Adding new fields to products

You’re able to add new fields in two different ways, as we outline in our Getting Started guide. While there’s the option to edit each individual product, instead we’ll show you how to add consistent custom fields to your products.

To do this, head to WooCommerce → Product Fields → Add New:

This will open up a page to set up a new field group – the cornerstone of the plugin:

Here, you’ll give your group a reference title, then look at the Fields section. This is where you’ll add custom fields for configurable products. Once you click on the Add your first field button, you’ll see a long list of boxes to help you create your fields:

While we can’t go through many of them here, one of the most important is the product Type. It lets you choose the format of the field in question, such as a drop-down menu, checkboxes, radio buttons, text areas, and much more:

Once you organize your fields, you’ll want to create conditional rules to help display them in the right places on your site. The Conditions metabox lets you add complex rules on a per-group basis, using both AND and OR operators, along with a predetermined list of selections:

Note that you also have layout options to help you display labels and instructions in the right place on your site. Regardless, once you do this, you can click the Publish button to save your changes. At this point, you should check out your new configurable products on the front-end:

From here, you’re able to tweak and optimize those custom fields as you see fit. You’ll also want to check out the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce documentation – there are lots of helpful tips, tricks, and guides to help you use the plugin to its full potential.

Conclusion

On the whole, customizable products can give your customers lines that they want, rather than pushing an imperfect product onto them. While WordPress offers no way to do this out of the box, WooCommerce does. However, this is also an imperfect solution, because there are limitations that you’ll need to overcome.

A WooCommerce configurable product plugin, such as Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce, can offer almost everything you need to offer a personalized set of product lines. The plugin is simple to use, dependable, flexible, and versatile. What’s more, the plugin is compatible with practically any theme, and you don’t need coding knowledge to use it.

The best news is that a Pro license is $59 per year, with a 14-day money-back guarantee!