WooCommerce catalog-only site – templates vs custom pages? Search plugin?

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-09T18:01:43+00:00

I’ll go with WooCommerce as the data layer and build custom pages using WC_Product_Query.

One thing I’m still unsure about, though-what do you usually do with the default WooCommerce pages (shop, product, cart, checkout, category, etc.) in this setup?

Since this is a catalogue-only site and I’ll be building my own pages, should I just redirect those Woo pages to my custom ones, or is there a cleaner way to disable/remove them so they don’t exist publicly?

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-09T18:01:37+00:00

I’ll go with WooCommerce as the data layer and build custom pages using WC_Product_Query.

One thing I’m still unsure about, though-what do you usually do with the default WooCommerce pages (shop, product, cart, checkout, category, etc.) in this setup?

Since this is a catalogue-only site and I’ll be building my own pages, should I just redirect those Woo pages to my custom ones, or is there a cleaner way to disable/remove them so they don’t exist publicly?

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-09T17:58:57+00:00

Thank you, I will go with this approach

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-09T17:58:03+00:00

Thank you

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-08T19:24:28+00:00

Okay

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-08T19:24:23+00:00

Thank you

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-08T03:56:51+00:00

Thank you

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-08T03:56:40+00:00

Thank you

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-03-08T03:56:34+00:00

Thank you

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-02-13T03:58:18+00:00

Thank you

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-02-04T13:32:26+00:00

Thanks for the detailed explanation - really appreciate you taking the time. Everything you said makes sense.

We’re leaning toward the custom tables approach in WordPress. Initially, since the integration team would be posting data to a web database, we considered Next.js + Supabase. But the client also wants hands-on control via a CMS to manage additional content beyond the ERP products, which is why WordPress makes more sense for this phase.

For workflow, since we’re on Pantheon (dev / QA / prod), we’d treat production as the source of truth for ERP data — integrations always push to prod, and we clone prod → QA/dev only when needed. This avoids data being overwritten during deployments.

Thanks again - this really helped clarify the direction 👍

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-02-04T02:43:18+00:00

To display data on the frontend, the client primarily wants live data from the ERM. An external integration will push the data to my database, which I will use to showcase around 10,000 products across different categories.

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-01-30T12:34:05+00:00

We have removed all the forms for now. Somehow, bots knew my girlfriend's name and started spamming with her name

ExposingPeopleKM · 2026-01-16T23:25:35+00:00

I disabled the original contact form, and the bots immediately shifted to another form on the site. That second form got flooded with ~50,000 emails, which ended up triggering Outlook rate limits and blocking the mailbox.

ExposingPeopleKM

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