Show Category Names and Descriptions on WooCommerce Product Pages

This snippet shows category descriptions on the WooCommerce single product page: each category of the current product, followed by its description if it has one. It’s handy when your categories carry useful text, such as sizing notes or material info, that you want to repeat on every product in that category.

Place it in a template that renders the single product, for example a copy of content-single-product.php in the woocommerce folder of your child theme. It has to run inside the product loop, because it reads the ID of the current post.

<?php 
    foreach( wp_get_post_terms( get_the_id(), 'product_cat' ) as $term ){
        if( $term ){
            echo $term->name . '<br>'; // product category name
            if ($term->description)
                echo $term->description . '<br>'; // Product category description
        }
    }
?>

How it works

• wp_get_post_terms() returns the product_cat terms (WooCommerce product categories) assigned to the product whose ID comes from get_the_id(). With 'fields' => 'names', the same function adds category names to WooCommerce order details.
• For each category, the loop prints $term->name followed by a line break.
• If the category has a description (added under Products > Categories), $term->description follows on the next line. Categories without one only show their name.
• The list only shows categories assigned to the product. A parent category doesn’t appear unless it’s ticked on the product too.

To show product tags instead, change product_cat to product_tag. The code prints the values as WordPress stores them, so in a production theme consider wrapping the name in esc_html() and the description in wp_kses_post(), and replacing the <br> tags with your own markup and CSS classes.

For product pages designed around your categories and their content, see my WooCommerce development services.

Related articles

• reading ACF fields saved on a category: for category content beyond the plain description, such as a banner image
• listing product categories with their thumbnails: a category grid built with get_terms()