I’m sharing this feedback to help both other WooCommerce users and the plugin author.
The plugin offers useful filtering features, but in our case we faced two important challenges before we could safely use it on a production WooCommerce store.
The first was SEO and crawl control. The plugin can generate a very large number of filter URLs. On larger stores, this can increase server load, consume CPU resources, and waste crawl budget on low-value pages if not carefully managed.
The second was WooCommerce archive behavior. On our installation, filtering worked on the main shop page but not consistently on some product archive pages, which created an unpredictable experience for users.
To make it work reliably, we had to add our own safeguards: limit indexation of facet pages, restrict some facet URL behavior, disable pretty permalinks for filters, and add a WooCommerce compatibility fix for archives.
I believe the plugin would benefit from more built-in SEO-safe options, such as:
* the ability to disable clickable filter links,
* clearer crawl and indexation controls,
* safeguards against large-scale URL generation,
* and more robust handling of WooCommerce archive pages.
Overall, the plugin has value, but it would be even stronger if these SEO and WooCommerce issues were addressed more proactively by default.
Author response
Hi Ro_meow,
Thank you for your detailed review and for sharing your experience.
Regarding SEO and crawl behavior - the plugin already prevents filtered result pages from being indexed by default by adding a meta robots tag with noindex,nofollow, which helps avoid common SEO issues with faceted navigation.
At the same time, the overall number of generated URLs is naturally dependent on the number of filters and terms configured, which is inherent to any filtering system.
It’s also worth noting that increased crawling activity has become more noticeable recently across many websites due to the rapid growth of AI crawlers.
At the same time, any WordPress plugin has limited ability to control how bots behave at the server level, which is something that typically needs to be managed at the server or infrastructure level.
As for disabling links or changing their structure - we’ve also explored replacing standard a tags in filters with non-link elements like span with a data-url attribute.
However, in practice modern search bots are still able to detect such URLs and follow them regardless of implementation details, so unfortunately this approach does not effectively solve the problem.
Regarding WooCommerce archives - this is not something we commonly see reported. The plugin is designed to work correctly with WooCommerce archive pages, so this may be related to a specific setup or theme. We’d be happy to take a closer look if you reach out to support.
That said, your suggestions about improving built-in controls and making these aspects more explicit are very valuable, and we will consider them for future improvements.
Thanks again for your feedback.
Best regards,
Andrii
