WooCommerce Change Words “Related Products”

By default WooCommerce uses the words “related product”, when showing the related products below a single product view.

I wished to change these words, supplementing the preferred text of my client.

Rather than editing the plugin directly which may subsequently be over-ridden on an update, I was looking to make the change either by the hooks and an entry in the file functions.php or by editing a copy of one of the template files.

Choosing to make the change by way of the template file, I copied the file related.php from

/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/single-product/related.php

to the child theme WooCommerce template directory

/wp-content/chlld-theme/woocommerce/single-product/related.php

Within the file look for:

<div class=”related products”><h2><?php _e(‘Related Products’, ‘woocommerce’); ?></h2>

Change the text between the <h2></h2> tags to your preferred text.

Periodically WooCommerce makes changes to the template files. An alert is shown on your WordPress admin if attention is required to your copied files. I have found it to be a simple task to review the differences between the new file and my website copy. If appropriate take a copy of the modified master template and re-implement your website specific changes.

Alternatively look to make the change in the language translation files

Looking in the translation file for WooCommerce, found at:

/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/i18n/languages/woocommerce.pot

#: templates/single-product/rating.php:42
msgid "%s customer review"
msgid_plural "%s customer reviews"
msgstr[0] ""
msgstr[1] ""

#: templates/single-product/related.php:51
msgid "Related Products"
msgstr ""

#: templates/single-product/review-meta.php:28
msgid "Your comment is awaiting approval"
msgstr ""

To make your change put your updated text in the msgstr, between the empty speech marks. for example:

#: templates/single-product/related.php:51
msgid "Related Products"
msgstr "Similar products"

This can be readily changed. However, as before with making such changes, the next update of the plugin is likely to over-write your changes.

My view is that it’s easier to make changes to the templates file, and compare this with a future update version. The template file will also accept annotation, allowing the changes to be highlighted and described.

Scanning down through and amending a language file with a list of language relationships will be harder. Also easy to forget the purpose of the change in the language file.