WPC Custom Related Products 3.2.5 – for WooCommerce

I installed WPC Custom Related Products on a WooCommerce shop where the theme’s “smart” related products were basically throwing random junk under every product. Same tag? Same category? Who cares, here’s a completely unrelated clearance item from 2019. Lovely.

The nice thing about WPC Custom Related Products is that it does one job and mostly stays out of the way: it lets me manually choose related products per product instead of trusting WooCommerce’s default lottery machine.

In the admin, the main settings sit under:

WPClever -> Related Products -> Settings

Then per product, go to:

Products -> Edit Product -> Product data -> Related Products

That’s where I picked exact product IDs using the AJAX search field. No weird builder panel, no mystery block, no “AI recommendations” nonsense. Just choose products and save.

What I actually liked

For once, I didn’t have to fight a plugin for two hours before it did the basic thing written on the box. WPC Custom Related Products replaces WooCommerce’s default related product logic with manually selected products, and that alone saved me from writing yet another ugly snippet in functions.php.

On my setup, the plugin worked fine with a regular GPL-licensed install and had no site-count drama. Unlimited Website Usage was exactly that: I used the same package on local, staging, and production without some license nag popping up every ten minutes. Activation was boring, which is how I like it. Install ZIP via:

Plugins -> Add New -> Upload Plugin

Then enable it. No key required for the basic workflow I tested. For manual updates, I just replaced:

wp-content/plugins/wpc-custom-related-products/

over SFTP after taking a backup. Not glamorous, but it works.

The WooCommerce template mess

Here’s where things get stupid, and it’s not really the plugin’s fault. If your theme overrides:

woocommerce/single-product/related.php

inside:

wp-content/themes/your-theme/woocommerce/single-product/related.php

then WPC Custom Related Products may be doing its job perfectly, while the theme is happily ignoring half the normal WooCommerce hooks. I absolutely hate this pattern. Theme devs copy Woo templates once in 2021 and then never update them. What were they thinking?

I checked this by temporarily switching to Storefront. Related products appeared correctly. Switched back to the client’s theme, broken again. Classic.

My dirty fix was removing the stale template override and letting WooCommerce use the default template. When the client insisted on keeping the theme layout, I copied a fresh related.php from:

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

into the child theme and re-applied only the needed wrapper classes. Not the whole ancient theme blob.

DevTools checks I had to do

I opened Chrome DevTools, went to the Network tab, filtered by admin-ajax.php, and checked the product search inside the product edit screen. The AJAX request was fine, but another admin plugin was throwing a Console error:

Uncaught TypeError: $(...).selectWoo is not a function

That broke the related product selector completely. Of course it did.

The culprit was an “admin optimization” plugin delaying WooCommerce admin scripts. I excluded these handles from delay/minify:

selectWoo
woocommerce_admin
wc-enhanced-select
jquery-core

After that, WPC Custom Related Products behaved normally again.

On the frontend, I also checked the DOM because some themes wrap related products in six nested sliders for no sane reason. The plugin output was clean enough; the bloat came from the theme’s carousel script, not from WPC Custom Related Products.

What you can change without touching PHP

The easy stuff is handled in the plugin settings and product editor:

WPClever -> Related Products -> Settings

There I could control the fallback behavior and how related products are selected when no custom list exists. Per product, I manually assigned items in the Product data panel.

Columns, product count, and heading style may still depend on your theme or WooCommerce template. If your theme exposes it, check:

Appearance -> Customize -> WooCommerce -> Product Catalog

or your theme panel. In one client theme it was buried under:

Theme Panel -> WooCommerce -> Single Product

Because obviously “related products columns” belongs three menus deep under something called “Shop Experience”. Sure.

What is hardcoded and needs real work

If you need to move the related products block, don’t expect a pretty toggle in Elementor. WooCommerce normally prints related products through:

woocommerce_after_single_product_summary

If the layout is wrong, I usually check functions.php in the child theme for something like:

remove_action(
  'woocommerce_after_single_product_summary',
  'woocommerce_output_related_products',
  20
);

Then I re-add it where I actually want it:

add_action(
  'woocommerce_after_single_product_summary',
  'woocommerce_output_related_products',
  15
);

For deeper debugging, check the database. Settings live in wp_options, usually with a woocrp-style option name. Product selections are stored in wp_postmeta, attached to the product ID. If I’m desperate, I search:

SELECT * FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE post_id = 123
AND meta_key LIKE '%woocrp%';

Not elegant, but when a client says “I saved it and it disappeared”, SQL tells the truth.

My main gripe

WPC Custom Related Products is simple, but it still relies on the WooCommerce ecosystem not being a dumpster fire. If your theme overrides templates, your cache plugin mangles admin JS, or your builder replaces the entire single product layout, you’ll still be debugging.

That said, I’d rather debug this than write custom related product logic from scratch again. For small and medium WooCommerce stores, WPC Custom Related Products is honestly a lifesaver.

FAQ

Why don’t my selected products show on the frontend?

Check for a theme override at:

your-theme/woocommerce/single-product/related.php

Temporarily switch to Storefront. If it works there, your theme template is the problem.

The product search field is broken in admin. What should I exclude from optimization?

Exclude:

selectWoo, wc-enhanced-select, woocommerce_admin, jquery-core

Especially if LiteSpeed Cache, Perfmatters, or Asset CleanUp is touching admin scripts.

Can Elementor control the related products from this plugin?

Not really. Elementor can style or replace the product template, but WPC Custom Related Products still feeds WooCommerce’s related products logic. If Elementor uses its own widget, test carefully.

Where do I bulk-fix bad related product data?

Use SQL carefully in wp_postmeta, or export products with meta fields via WP All Export / WP All Import. Don’t hand-edit 500 products unless you enjoy suffering.