How to Show Recently Viewed Products in WooCommerce

A lot of store owners assume WooCommerce needs a paid plugin to show a “recently viewed” section. It doesn’t – WooCommerce already tracks this in the background and ships with a built-in widget for it. The confusion comes from wanting more control than that widget gives you: placing the list somewhere other than a sidebar, like the homepage or the cart page.

Here’s both the quick native option and a custom shortcode for when you need it placed somewhere specific.

Option 1: The Native Widget (No Code Needed)

WooCommerce already tracks which products a visitor has viewed, cookie by cookie, without any setup on your part. To display that list:

Go to Appearance > Widgets
Add the Recently Viewed Products widget to any sidebar or widget area
If you’re using a block theme, search for the equivalent block in the block editor instead

This works immediately for most stores. The limitation is that it’s tied to widget areas – if your theme doesn’t have a sidebar on the page you want it, or you want it inline within page content rather than in a sidebar, you’ll need the shortcode approach below.

Option 2: A Custom Shortcode (Place It Anywhere)

This tracks viewed products independently and gives you a shortcode you can drop into any page, post, or template – the homepage, the cart page, wherever you want.

Step 1 – Track viewed products in a cookie

/**
 * Track viewed products in a cookie whenever a single product page is visited.
 */
add_action( 'woocommerce_before_single_product', 'wpcodex_track_viewed_product' );
function wpcodex_track_viewed_product() {

    global $product;

    if ( ! $product ) {
        return;
    }

    $max_items = 10;
    $viewed    = isset( $_COOKIE['wpcodex_viewed_products'] ) ? (array) json_decode( stripslashes( $_COOKIE['wpcodex_viewed_products'] ) ) : array();

    $product_id = $product->get_id();

    // Remove if already in the list, then add it to the front
    $viewed = array_diff( $viewed, array( $product_id ) );
    array_unshift( $viewed, $product_id );

    $viewed = array_slice( $viewed, 0, $max_items );

    wc_setcookie( 'wpcodex_viewed_products', json_encode( $viewed ), time() + ( 30 * DAY_IN_SECONDS ) );
}

Step 2 – Add the shortcode to display them

/**
 * Shortcode to display recently viewed products: [wpcodex_recently_viewed]
 */
add_shortcode( 'wpcodex_recently_viewed', 'wpcodex_recently_viewed_shortcode' );
function wpcodex_recently_viewed_shortcode( $atts ) {

    $atts = shortcode_atts( array(
        'limit' => 4,
    ), $atts );

    if ( empty( $_COOKIE['wpcodex_viewed_products'] ) ) {
        return '';
    }

    $viewed_ids = array_map( 'absint', (array) json_decode( stripslashes( $_COOKIE['wpcodex_viewed_products'] ) ) );

    // Don't show the product currently being viewed, if any
    if ( is_product() ) {
        global $product;
        $viewed_ids = array_diff( $viewed_ids, array( $product->get_id() ) );
    }

    $viewed_ids = array_slice( $viewed_ids, 0, absint( $atts['limit'] ) );

    if ( empty( $viewed_ids ) ) {
        return '';
    }

    $ids_string = implode( ',', $viewed_ids );

    return do_shortcode( '[products ids="' . $ids_string . '" orderby="post__in"]' );
}

Use it by placing [wpcodex_recently_viewed] in any page or post, or inside a template file with echo do_shortcode( '[wpcodex_recently_viewed limit="4"]' );.

The shortcode reuses WooCommerce’s own core [products] shortcode behind the scenes, so the output styling automatically matches the rest of your store’s product grid without any extra CSS.

Where to Add This Code

Your child theme’s functions.php, or
A site-specific plugin (recommended – it survives theme updates), or
A code snippets plugin like WPCode or Code Snippets

Troubleshooting

The list is empty even after viewing several products.
Check whether your hosting or a caching plugin is stripping cookies on page load. Some aggressive full-page caching setups don’t allow cookies to be set correctly unless the product pages are excluded from the cache, since a cached page can’t run the PHP that sets the cookie.

It shows the same products for every visitor.
This usually means the cookie isn’t being scoped per-browser correctly, often caused by a caching layer serving an identical cached version of a page to everyone. If you’re using a full-page cache, confirm dynamic, cookie-based content like this is allowed to bypass it.

Can I show this to logged-in users across devices, not just per-browser?
Not with this snippet as written, since it relies on browser cookies rather than user accounts. To track it per logged-in user account instead, you’d need to store the viewed list in user meta rather than a cookie, keyed to the logged-in user ID.

FAQ

Does this slow down my product pages?
No. Reading and writing a small cookie is a negligible operation compared to a full product page load.

Will this conflict with the native WooCommerce widget?
No, they’re independent of each other. You can use the native widget in a sidebar and the custom shortcode elsewhere on the same site without any conflict, since they use separate cookies.

Can I exclude out-of-stock products from the recently viewed list?
Yes – add a stock status check inside the shortcode function before including a product ID in the final output, so any product that’s gone out of stock since it was viewed won’t be shown.

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