Hello. I am working on rebuilding my old website with 1100 products and about 10 000 options, like different length, size, weight. So what I noticed from analytics, that basically the same thing is happening like with google search results that most people will not go down to second or third page and result is that my products compete with each other in my own store.
So idea right now is to utilize variation and swatches to minimize repeating products, where all information matches, just different color , or multiple sizes and list them under same product. Using this I could make my portfolio like 300-350 instead of 1100
# Where the problem comes in
After getting familiar with how things work, it seems it doesn’t have the right markup to work properly.
For example:
* variation does not have unique url, if i wanted to share URL green color that i selected, and main is blue, so once person opens the link i shared, he starts from blue, not my intended green, same would happen when google index url, photo is one color but when you open it gives you default value and can confuse the customer that the result from google directed to different thing he expected (google webmaster recommends for each variation to have unique URL)
* Filtering. It seems most themes and plugins gives the product that have that color or size, not actually selecting and displaying it. So again blue color is main, on product archive i select to filter green, most likely it will list blue where again you need to select green
* Selecting swatch on product archive, then click through to product gives default starting color, not the one i selected in archive.
* Most likely search results will be confusing, like you search for green, and search pages gives you red,blue any other color, but not green if it’s not the main color.
So the idea of swatches and variation is to ease up the navigation and speed up selection showcasing all you got but in reality what I seen on the market it doesn’t work great. Feels like most themes rushed out to show that they support swatches, but really they got right only the first step.
Is there any good, worked out solution that’s working good? A theme that addressed all those things? Or my only route to solve this, have like 3 different plugins that each address navigational issues and adheres to rules and recommendations of google?
How to properly index such variable products? Manually write structured data for them using google guideline to variable product?
Interestingly, URL function seems to be already in WP code, if you add to basket variable product, if you hoover in basket on that product it gives this updated URL:
attribute\_pa\_color=black&attribute\_pa\_size=10mm
Looking forward hearing your perspective and experience. Is it really worth it to have all products variable both from customer perspective and whether it’s possible to rank high against competition?
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