The checkout is one of the most important steps in any eCommerce store. If you want to be successful and boost your sales, keep it lean. Today, we’ll show you how to hide and remove WooCommerce checkout fields.

Some days ago, we gave you some tips on optimizing your site. However, the last step of the sales funnel is crucial to closing the sale, so it needs special attention.

Why disable WooCommerce checkout fields?

Did you know that over 75% of users add a product to the cart but then leave the website without buying anything? One of the main reasons for shopping cart abandonment is that the checkout is too long or complicated.

The checkout page must be simple and have only the necessary fields to avoid this. This is especially important if you sell digital or virtual products such as software, music, ebooks, etc. As this type of product doesn’t need to be shipped, they should have a specific checkout page where you don’t need to ask for details such as address or postal code.

Check out this article to learn more about improving the checkout process for digital products. Hide the fields that add distractions and friction to the checkout page to boost conversions.

Let’s look at how to delete checkout fields in WooCommerce and speed up the checkout process.

How do you remove checkout fields in WooCommerce?

As it’s not possible to delete WooCommerce default checkout fields from the WordPress dashboard, in this tutorial, we’ll show you how to hide and remove checkout fields in two different ways:

1. Using a plugin
2. Using the WordPress editor
3. With a PHP script

Using a plugin or the Gutenberg editor is the easiest option if you’re not a developer. The PHP script, however, allows you to hide any existing checkout fields and customize your WooCommerce store with some coding. There’s no better or worse method. You’ll get the same result with both of them, so depending on your skills, you can choose the one that best suits you.

1) Remove WooCommerce checkout fields using a plugin

There are many tools to disable and hide fields on the checkout page. Here, we’re going to show you how to do it using two free plugins:

1. WooCommerce Checkout Manager
2. Direct Checkout for WooCommerce

These tools work similarly but have some differences. Let’s examine how these plugins can help you delete some checkout fields.

1.1 – Delete checkout fields with WooCommerce Checkout Manager

WooCommerce Checkout Manager is one of the best tools to remove checkout fields. This freemium plugin has a free version and three premium plans that start at 19 USD (one-time payment).

To disable any of the WooCommerce checkout fields, simply follow these steps:

Install and activate WooCommerce Checkout Manager. You can either go to Plugins > Add New and search for “WooCommerce Checkout Manager” or download it for free from this link. The tool has a pro version with more advanced features, but the free version is enough for this task.

Go to the WooCommerce tab in your WordPress dashboard. Click on Checkout and then on the Billing tab.

You’ll see a list of all the fields you can hide, so just activate the disable option in the field you want to remove.

Afterward, you can go to the Shipping and Additional tabs and turn off the fields you want to delete.

After you hide all the fields you don’t want on the WooCommerce checkout page, remember to save the changes—that’s it!

It was short and sweet.

Apart from removing fields, this plugin lets you add new fields, make fields optional or required, change the order in which you display the fields, apply conditional logic, and much more. So, if you want a tool to customize the checkout, WooCommerce Checkout Manager is an excellent option.

1.2 – Remove checkout fields with Direct Checkout for WooCommerce

WooCommerce Direct Checkout is an excellent plugin that simplifies the checkout process and page. This tool aims to speed up checkout and give users a better buying experience. Unlike WooCommerce Checkout Manager, which allows you to turn fields on and off, Direct Checkout helps remove unnecessary fields and increase conversion rates.

This is a freemium tool. It has a free version with basic features and three premium plans that start at 19 USD (one-time payment). To delete fields from the WooCommerce checkout page with Direct Checkout, you need to:

Install and activate WooCommerce Direct Checkout. In your WP dashboard, you can go to Plugins > Add New and search for “WooCommerce Direct Checkout” or download it for free from this link.

Go to the WooCommerce tab in your WordPress dashboard. Press Direct Checkout and then go to the Checkout tab.

Here, you’ll see a list of all the fields you can remove, such as country, state, order comments, policy text, columns, and more. You can also direct users from the product page directly to the checkout from the General tab using the Added to cart redirect to option.

Once you delete the fields you don’t want on the checkout page, simply save the changes.

In conclusion, these two plugins are an excellent choice for a quick and straightforward solution. They allow you to remove WooCommerce checkout fields with a few clicks and optimize your store.

Apart from being very easy to use, these tools have excellent performance and are two of the best checkout plugins for WooCommerce. The main drawback of this method is that when you install a plugin, you’re modifying the code of your website.

2) Using the WordPress Gutenberg

You can also hide or remove WooCommerce checkout fields without using a dedicated plugin or a snippet. The recent version of WooCommerce comes with dedicated Cart and Checkout blocks. Before, you needed a custom shortcode where you could only see the fields on the front end of the website, but now, you can customize every field from the Gutenberg editor.

Here is how you can show/hide WooCommerce fields. First, open the WooCommerce checkout page via the Gutenberg editor and you will see all the blocks and their customization options.

If you check the right-hand side of the page, you will see options to hide certain blocks from the page.

WooCommerce will remove those from the checkout form as you turn off fields via the settings.

The options are limited as the cart and checkout blocks are still under development.

In the next section, we will show you how to use PHP snippets for the modification.

3) Remove WooCommerce checkout fields with PHP script

NOTE: Before we start, we recommend you create a child theme. This way, instead of customizing the parent theme’s files, you’ll modify the child theme so your customizations won’t be overridden when you update the parent theme. If you don’t want to create a child theme, you can generate a complete site backup if something goes wrong.

This section will show how to delete checkout fields from the WooCommerce checkout by coding your solution. If you’ve checked our tutorial on how to edit checkout fields, you’ll be familiar with WooCommerce hooks. In this case, we will use the woocommerce_checkout_fields hook, and we’ll call it quadlayers_remove_checkout_fields as follows:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_checkout_fields' , 'quadlayers_remove_checkout_fields' );

This is a filter hook type, meaning it must return something when you execute it. And what is it going to return? The data with the fields you want to remove.

Remove the last name.

For example, if you want to delete the last name field, you can use the following:

unset($fields['billing']['billing_last_name']);

After that, you need to insert it into a function with the same name you’ve used in the filter hook in the first step (quadlayers_remove_checkout_fields):

function quadlayers_remove_checkout_fields( $fields ) {

unset($fields['billing']['billing_last_name']); 

return $fields; 

}

Finally, insert the entire script to remove the WooCommerce field’s last name in the functions.php file of a child theme, as shown below:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_checkout_fields' , 'quadlayers_remove_checkout_fields' ); 

function quadlayers_remove_checkout_fields( $fields ) { 

unset($fields['billing']['billing_last_name']); 

return $fields; 

}

Delete any other fields

So, if you want to delete any other field, you need to add the corresponding line. Below, you can find the available names of fields that you can remove:

unset($fields['billing']['billing_first_name']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_last_name']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_company']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_address_1']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_address_2']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_city']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_postcode']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_country']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_state']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_phone']);
unset($fields['order']['order_comments']);
unset($fields['billing']['billing_email']);
unset($fields['account']['account_username']);
unset($fields['account']['account_password']);
unset($fields['account']['account_password-2']);

How to show checkout fields that have previously been removed

What can you do if you delete some checkout fields you want to display again? Remove the line of code that hides the specific field you want to show. For example, if you disabled the postcode field from the billing section and now you want to add it again, you have to remove the following line from the functions.php file of your child theme:

unset($fields['billing']['billing_postcode']);

Similarly, you can delete several lines simultaneously if you want to display several fields simultaneously.

Bonus: How to remove the Additional Information tab in WooCommerce

The Additional Information tab comes by default in WooCommerce. As this tab is displayed only when the product has weight, dimensions, or attributes, sometimes it’s not very useful. There are two ways to turn off the Additional Information tab:

1. Via PHP: Editing the functions.php file.
2. Via CSS: Editing the style.css file.

The PHP method is better in terms of performance because it stops the tab from loading (instead of loading it and then hiding it). So here we’ll show you how to remove the Additional Information tab with a PHP script.

NOTE: We recommend applying these changes to your child theme to avoid losing your customizations when you update your theme.

1. Go to your FTP and open the wp-content folder. Then, go to the theme and open your child_theme folder.
2. There, open the functions.php file.
3. Go to the bottom and insert the following code:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_tabs' , 'quadlayers_remove_product_tabs' );
function quadlayers_remove_product_tabs ( $tabs ) {
unset( $tabs['additional_information'] );
return $tabs;
}

Remember to save the changes and then refresh the page. That’s it! You’ve removed the Additional Information tab!

Remove the description tab and reviews

Additionally, you can get rid of the description tab and the reviews tab with the following code:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_tabs' , 'quadlayers_remove_product_tabs' );
function quadlayers_remove_product_tabs( $tabs ) {
unset( $tabs['description'] );
unset( $tabs['reviews'] );
return $tabs;
}

Which WooCommerce checkout fields should you remove?

So, which checkout fields should you remove? It depends on whether you sell physical or digital products and how much information you want to get from your customers. However, keep in mind that longer checkout forms usually have lower conversions. Customers tend to avoid long checkouts, so here are some tips to keep the checkout page short:

• If you sell digital products, hide all the fields related to shipping, such as the address, postal code, city, and so on.
• Only display mandatory fields. You can hide or collapse optional fields such as company name.
• Disable the postcode validation to reduce friction on the checkout page.
• If you sell physical products, make the billing details the shipping details by default to hide unnecessary fields.
• When possible, use autofill to reduce users’ time filling out the form.
• Use only one field for the name. Instead of displaying three fields (first name, middle name, and surname), you could use a Full Name field.

Another option to reduce the steps on the checkout page and increase conversions is to use a quick buy button for WooCommerce. Most big eCommerce players users because it’s a very effective way to speed up the purchase process and let the shoppers buy in one click.

Conclusion

In conclusion, your checkout page can significantly impact your business and give you a competitive advantage. Therefore, it’s critical to optimize it and improve it as much as you can.

In this tutorial, we’ve seen three ways to remove and disable WooCommerce checkout fields. Each has pros and cons, so you should choose the one that best suits your skills and needs.

WooCommerce Checkout Manager and Direct Checkout are great plugins that allow you to disable fields quickly and easily. However, they make the store’s code more complex. The PHP function requires some coding, but it’s cleaner and won’t consume any resources. If you need to use the built-in WordPress function to handle the fields, use the Gutenberg editor.

Apart from removing checkout fields, you can also improve the purchase process on your site by creating sales funnels.

Finally, if you want to improve your checkout page, we recommend you look at our tutorial on how to customize the checkout in WooCommerce and our guide on editing checkout fields.

Which method did you choose? Do you know any other way to remove WooCommerce checkout fields? Leave a comment below and share your experiences with us.