5+ Best Variation Swatches Plugins for WooCommerce

Do you want to improve your customer experience and boost your conversation rates? (Spoiler alert: we’re going to assume you do!) Then adding variation swatches to your WooCommerce store might be just the thing you need to add a little more spark to the shopping experience on your website.

When you display product variations, you offer your customers a personalized visual experience. And that type of customization increases your chances of selling. In this article, we’ll look at five of the best WooCommerce variation swatches plugins. We’ll show you how to set up your first image and color swatches.

What are WooCommerce variation swatches?

Lots of ecommerce websites use variation swatches, a feature that displays product variations such as color and size. These variation swatches don’t display variations in a dropdown menu (as it is the default behavior of WooCommerce), but they are visualized as clickable buttons or images.

As soon as a customer clicks on a swatch to select it, it is visually highlighted to indicate their choice. What’s more, the product image and price are updated automatically to reflect the selected variation.

This provides customers with a very user-friendly way to pick and choose what they want. WooCommerce variation swatches enhance the user experience and make the product page look more visually appealing and engaging. This increases the odds that people enjoy the time they spend shopping on your ecommerce website.

Why should you add variation swatches to your WooCommerce store?

There are plenty of reasons for adding variation swatches to your ecommerce store. In short, swatches offer benefits for you as a store owner and for your customers, so it’s a win-win situation. Let’s go over the advantages below:

• The user experience on your website improves when variation swatches are added. Customers can use them to easily select the product variation they want, especially when it comes down to visual attributes like color and pattern, e.g. on a T-shirt or fabric. With a dropdown menu, those specifics can be hard to distinguish, but variation swatches automatically visually display the options.
• The customer journey is simplified. With variation swatches, customers can quickly see all the available options and make their preferred selection with just 1 click. In other words, they need to invest less time and effort for the same result.
• The visual appeal of variation swatches is an obvious advantage. Your products are more enticing for customers, which is great for your conversion rate. But the flexibility is also a huge bonus. You can choose what type of variations you want to offer for your products with a variety of swatch types, such as color, images, and labels.
• All these benefits come together to offer you a competitive advantage. When you provide a better user experience than other stores that use traditional dropdown menus for product variations, customers will notice the difference. Hopefully you will too when looking at the number of orders you receive!

Plenty of WooCommerce stores offer a large inventory of products that come with multiple variations, such as size, color, material, or style. They can really benefit from adding variation swatches. Businesses that may find this feature particularly useful include those selling clothes, cosmetics, home goods, electronics, and more. Customers have really come to expect visual customization options when shopping for those products online, so don’t miss the train on offering a wider range of options to increase your sales.

The best WooCommerce swatches plugins for WordPress

When you’ve decided to add variation swatches to your ecommerce store on WordPress, the best way to start is to look for a plugin that suits your needs. Plugins are an easy way to enhance the functionality of your shop pages with swatches offering visual customization options.

We have selected the 5 best WooCommerce swatches plugins for WordPress. Below, you will find out what makes them different, which will help you choose a plugin that works for you.

1. Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce

The Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin does not only offer a wide range of swatches, but it also allows store owners to add other input fields like text boxes, dropdown menus, images, and more.

One of the perks of this plugin is that it can adjust the price depending on the choices customers make. If they want a ring that is gold-plated rather than platinum, they will see a different price because of the value of the materials, for example.

The plugin provides various other user-friendly features: it offers repeatable fields; the main product image can change depending on the selected options; the plugin comes with multi-currency support; it allows shoppers to edit their product data from the cart page; and it integrates with your multilingual store via WPML or Polylang.

Advantages

The Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin offers several sought-after advantages:

• It supports other functionality alongside swatches, such as text boxes, dropdowns, images, and more.
• Reviews report wide compatibility and usability, as well as great support.
• Customization: You can add custom fields to your products, such as text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more. In other words, this plugin gives you greater flexibility and control over the product data you display. You can also add content fields such as HTML, shortcodes, or extra images.
• It comes with several high-quality addons in case you want to extend functionality, e.g. ACF integration, image upload features, pre-fill fields through URL parameters, live content preview, and more.

One thing to pay attention to is that this plugin by Studio Wombat doesn’t support older Woo or WP versions. The upside of this is that customers can benefit from modern, fast code, but it may be an issue for people who still run older versions on their webshop.

Pricing: A limited free version is available on the WordPress plugin repository. The paid version starts at $59 per year. It is backed by a 14-day refund policy, so you can try it out before you commit.

2. Variation Swatches for WooCommerce By RadiusTheme

Variation Swatches for WooCommerce by RadiusTheme is a popular plugin that allows you to convert product variation selection fields into 4 types of swatches: radio buttons, images, colors, and labels.

Some of the features that the Variation Swatches for WooCommerce plugin offers are useful when you want to offer your customers more customization possibilities for your product attributes.

You can add color and image swatches to your WooCommerce product variations so customers can select any type of variation they want.

This plugin offers dual color variation swatches (which not many do!) and you can edit your swatches by choosing square or rounded layouts, different backgrounds, font color and size, and more.

Variation Swatches for WooCommerce is an affordable plugin. The yearly purchase price is lower than a lot of other WooCommerce plugins, including the ones highlighted here.

One downside is that the plugin is pretty limited in terms of what it offers. If you only want to add swatches to your product variations, this might be a good plugin for you, but it doesn’t offer much functionality beyond that.

Pricing: Starts at $29 a year.

3. Variation Swatches and Photos by Element Stark

The Variation Swatches and Photos plugin by Element Stark is a straightforward, simple plugin you can use to add color and image swatches to your variable products.

By adding color and image swatches with this plugin, you make it easier for your customers to select the product variation they want. In the easy admin interface you can define colors and images at the attribute or product level.

This plugin comes with some nice advantages: not only does it offer premium support, but you also have access to tutorial videos. If you’d like to see the plugin in action, have a look at this live demo.

Despite the ease of use and support of multiple swatch types, this plugin doesn’t offer as much variety as some of the other swatch plugins we highlight in this article. There are more affordable options that still provide more features, so that’s an important aspect to take into account.

Pricing: $99 a year.

4. Variation Swatches for WooCommerce by ThemeHigh

The Variation Swatches for WooCommerce plugin by ThemeHigh allows you to create 4 different types of swatches: color, image, label/button, and radio.

You can also choose between square and circle icons to display your attributes, so it’s a nice plugin to play around with.

With this plugin, it only takes one click to convert from the default WooCommerce variation dropdowns to variation swatches for your product attributes.

Once you’ve done that, you have access to customizable swatch designs: you can define the swatch icon, customize the hover and border details, style the tooltip, and more to make the swatches blend in with your shop pages. 

You can highlight the selected swatch with a checkmark, and if variant swatches are out of stock, you can choose whether you want to hide, blur, or cross them. Alternatively, you can also display image and color swatches in a dropdown.

From reviews we gather they offer decent support, but be aware that the free version of this plugin only offers basic swatch functionality. A lot of the advanced features require a premium upgrade.

Pricing: Starts from $39 a year.

#5. Swatchly

Swatchly is a feature-rich plugin that allows your customers to easily find what they’re searching for with a large number of product options, like colors, buttons, images, variation images, and radio buttons.

This plugin offers a lot of flexibility: You can choose from various swatch shapes and set the swatch width, height, and font size.

Moreover, you can override the swatch settings for each individual product, and you can easily enable/disable the tooltip.

Another interesting feature is that you can automatically convert default WooCommerce variation dropdown menus into swatches.

This intuitive plugin helps you save time when adding swatches to your variable products, and it is a budget-friendly option, because its free version comes with lots of core features. However, you can’t use it to import or export swatches in bulk, and you might experience conflicts with other themes and plugins you’re using for your ecommerce store, so make sure to check that before buying the plugin.

Pricing: The plugin has a free version with many core features. The premium plan starts at $99 a year.

Which plugin is best?

As always, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Which plugin is the best plugin for your WooCommerce store depends on several factors, including:

• Preferred features and functionality: do you want to keep it light and simple, or are you looking for specific add-ons to increase the functionality?
• Your budget: there are free versions available that all cater to basic needs. If that is enough for you, why bother paying?
• Quality of code: this one might be hard to investigate if you are not a programmer. WordPress has many hobby-developers that create plugins while they learn to program. This is not ideal for you as you want something of high-quality that keeps your site lean and fast.
• Compatibility with your existing theme and plugins: you want to make sure the plugin you choose is compatible with the other products you’re using.
• Support: when setting up a plugin, the support can really influence how smooth the setup process is for you. Make sure you look for a plugin with excellent support.
• Reviews and ratings: this goes without saying, but before you decide, make sure to have a look at the ratings of people who have gone before you. There is often a wealth of useful information in previous reviews that can save you a lot of time and hassle down the line.

When you are looking for advanced features and comprehensive control over your field types, we highly recommend the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin. This plugin is not only user-friendly and quality-coded, but it’s also cost-effective.

Below, we’ll look at how you can get started with this high-quality plugin.

How to get started with Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce

The Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin is easy to get started with. Below we share the first steps you need to take for a smooth user experience. For more detailed instructions, make sure to check out the article Getting Started with Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce.

First, you’ll want to purchase and install the plugin. Once you’ve done that, you can go into the WordPress admin menu. Go to WooCommerce → Product Fields and click Add New to create an empty field group.

Then, click the Add Field button to create a new field and add it to the bottom of the list. You can easily reorder fields by dragging the order handle with your mouse.

You can then further customize the settings of your fields, including the field type, label, instructions, and requirements. Don’t forget to save your changes when you’re done!

Of course, you can also change the global settings if you want to modify the plugin’s behavior. To do that, go to WooCommerce → Settings → Product fields.

These short steps will help you get started with the Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce plugin, but there is plenty more information in the documentation for this plugin if you’re looking for anything specific.

Get started with variation swatches on your WooCommerce store

As we have explained, variation swatches offer great benefits and contribute to a positive customer experience. Visual aids really make a difference to the online shopping experience, and variation swatches make it very obvious to your customers what their preferred products will look like if they place an order.

There are lots of plugins out there offering variation swatches, so you’ll need to take some time to research which one best suits your needs. There is a plugin out there for everyone, but we recommend using Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce, which is both a budget-friendly and comprehensive plugin.

But why take our word for it if you can try it out yourself? Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee, so make sure to give it a go!