How to export and import WooCommerce product slugs?

Recently, one of my clients asked me how to export slugs of his WooCommerce products from his old website to his new WooCommerce website. I’d never faced this question before, so I was sure that the WooCommerce CSV Importer and Exporter had this feature by default. Well, I was wrong: for some reason, it does not.

However, I found an easy way to extend its default features and make it possible to export and import WooCommerce product slugs. So I hope that my solution will be helpful for people that have the same question in the future.

Let’s get started!

How to export WooCommerce product slugs?

Let’s start with the export. If you go with the default slugs that WordPress generates for you, you probably don’t need this post at all. However, if you have manually modified your products’ slugs, it makes sense to migrate them if you export your products to a new website.

By default, the WooCommerce Product Exporter does not have a column like “Slug” or anything like this. Luckily, this part of WooCommerce inherits the WordPress philosophy of extensibility by action and filter hooks.

Using the official Product CSV Importer & Exporter guide by WooCommerce let’s add a new export column. By the way, I highly recommend you to check this guide if you want to learn more about extending the WooCommerce import/export suite. Here’s the code I’m going to use:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_export_column_names', 'add_slug_export_column' );
add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_export_product_default_columns', 'add_slug_export_column' );

function add_slug_export_column( $columns ) {
	$columns['slug'] = 'Slug';
 
	return $columns;
}

Now, if I go to the product exporter, I see the new column I can choose to export:

Looks good, but we’re not done yet.

Now, we need to tell WooCommerce what data it should use for this column.

The official guide I mentioned above uses $product->get_meta() for this. Product slugs are not meta fields, but we can get them a similar way:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_export_product_column_slug'  , 'add_export_data_slug', 10, 2 );
function add_export_data_slug( $value, $product ) {
    $value = $product->get_slug();

    return $value;
}

Note that in the woocommerce_product_export_product_column_slug filter’s name slug is a dynamic part which corresponds to the column’s ID you specified in the previous snippet.

Let’s run an export to test if everything works as expected.

Here’s the CSV file I got as the result:

Nice, just what we need.

The exporting part is done. Now we need to tell WooCommerce how to use this column while importing products.

How to import WooCommerce product slugs?

Using another section of the same guide, we can add Slug column support to the products importer as well.

add_filter( 'woocommerce_csv_product_import_mapping_options', 'add_slug_import_option' );
function add_slug_import_option( $options ) {
  $options['slug'] = 'Slug';
 
  return $options;
}

add_filter( 'woocommerce_csv_product_import_mapping_default_columns', 'add_default_slug_column_mapping' );
function add_default_slug_column_mapping( $columns ) {
  $columns['Slug'] = 'slug';
 
  return $columns;
} 

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_import_pre_insert_product_object', 'process_import_product_slug_column', 10, 2 );
function process_import_product_slug_column( $object, $data ) {
  if ( !empty( $data['slug'] ) ) {
    $object->set_slug( $data['slug'] );
  }
 
  return $object;
}

Basically, you can add the snippet above to your new website to import slugs from the CSV file you created in the previous section.

That’s all. We successfully migrated product slugs from one website to another.

Final code

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_export_column_names', 'add_slug_export_column' );
add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_export_product_default_columns', 'add_slug_export_column' );

function add_slug_export_column( $columns ) {
	$columns['slug'] = 'Slug';
 
	return $columns;
}

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_export_product_column_slug'  , 'add_export_data_slug', 10, 2 );
function add_export_data_slug( $value, $product ) {
    $value = $product->get_slug();
	
    return $value;
}

add_filter( 'woocommerce_csv_product_import_mapping_options', 'add_slug_import_option' );
function add_slug_import_option( $options ) {
  $options['slug'] = 'Slug';
 
  return $options;
}

add_filter( 'woocommerce_csv_product_import_mapping_default_columns', 'add_default_slug_column_mapping' );
function add_default_slug_column_mapping( $columns ) {
  $columns['Slug'] = 'slug';
 
  return $columns;
} 

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_import_pre_insert_product_object', 'process_import_product_slug_column', 10, 2 );
function process_import_product_slug_column( $object, $data ) {
  if ( !empty( $data['slug'] ) ) {
    $object->set_slug( $data['slug'] );
  }
 
  return $object;
}

Summary

Although I believe that this feature should come with WooCommerce by default, as you see, it’s pretty easy to implement it on your own.

As always, I hope you found this post helpful.

If you have any questions or issues, feel free to write about them in the comments section under this post or even contact me directly.

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Thank you for your attention; see you in the next one!