Check if a Product Belongs to a Specific Category or Tag

If you have tried using the in_category() function to check if a specific product belongs to a certain product category, you probably did not succeed. In this guide, we will see why…

This is a common mistake indeed. So let’s start by noting that products in WooCommerce are a custom content type called product, and the product categories themselves are a taxonomy called product_cat. Are we working with functions for categories and tags for taxonomies? Of course not…

Unlike the is_product_category() function, in the case of checking if a product belongs to a specific category, WooCommerce does not provide conditional tags, so we must use WordPress’s default conditions:

has_term( $terms, 'product_cat', $post );

• (string|integer|array) $terms – Used to pass the category name, category ID, or an array of IDs.
• The second parameter is the name of the taxonomy, which in this case for product categories is product_cat. Alternatively, for product tags, we would use product_tag.
• (integer|object) $post – The product’s ID or a WP_Post object. If not supplied, it will default to the current product in the loop.

Code Examples

Now let’s look at a few code examples:

if( has_term( 4, 'product_cat' ) ) {
    // do something if the current product in the loop is in product category with ID 4
}

if( has_term( array( 'sneakers', 'backpacks' ), 'product_cat', 50 ) ) {
    // do something if the product with ID 50 is either in the 'sneakers' or 'backpacks' category
} else {
    // do something else if it isn't
}

if( has_term( 5, 'product_tag', 971 ) ) {
    // do something if the product with ID = 971 has a tag with ID = 5
}

That’s it for this short post, and thanks to Misha for the knowledge appearing in this post. Check his website!