Custom product tabs in WooCommerce: reusable shipping, care and size guide tabs

The single product page is where shoppers decide whether to buy, and it tends to fill up with information that does not belong in the main description: shipping times, return windows, care instructions, size charts, warranty notes. Custom product tabs give that information a clean home. This guide explains what custom tabs are, why reusable store-wide tabs save you work, and how to set them up in WooCommerce.

What Custom Product Tabs Are

A custom product tab is an extra tab on the WooCommerce single product page that holds content you define, shown next to the built-in tabs.

By default WooCommerce gives every product three tabs: Description, Additional information, and Reviews. A custom tab adds a fourth (and fifth, and sixth) for content that has its own natural heading. Instead of stuffing shipping details and a care guide into the bottom of the description, you give each topic its own labelled tab that shoppers can open when they want it.

The result is a product page that stays scannable. The description sells the product, and the supporting detail sits one click away, organised and easy to find.

Why Reusable, Store-Wide Tabs Help

Reusable tabs are defined once and shown across your catalogue, rather than retyped on every product.

Most of the information that lands in a custom tab is identical from product to product. Your shipping policy, returns window, and care instructions rarely change between items. Editing that text into hundreds of product descriptions by hand is slow, and it goes stale the moment the policy changes.

Store-wide reusable tabs fix this:

• Edit once, update everywhere. Change your returns policy in one place and every product reflects it.
• Stay consistent. No drift between products caused by copy and paste or half-finished edits.
• Save time on new products. A new item inherits your shared tabs automatically, so you only write what is genuinely product-specific.
• Reduce support questions. Shipping, sizing and care answers sit on the page, where shoppers look first.

Tabs Worth Adding to a Product Page

The best custom tabs answer a question a shopper has before buying. Common examples include:

1. Shipping and returns - delivery times, costs, and how to send something back.
2. Size guide - measurements, a sizing chart, or fit notes for clothing and footwear.
3. Care instructions - washing, storage, or maintenance details for the product.
4. Warranty and guarantee - what is covered and for how long.
5. Materials and ingredients - composition details for fashion, cosmetics or food.

Each of these is a self-contained topic that does not belong in the headline description but still influences the buying decision. A dedicated tab keeps it accessible without overwhelming the page.

How to Add Custom Tabs in WooCommerce

WooCommerce does not include a built-in editor for arbitrary custom tabs, so most stores add them with a small plugin. The general workflow is the same whichever tool you use:

1. Decide your tabs. Pick the handful of topics that apply across your catalogue (shipping, returns, care, sizing).
2. Write each tab once. Give it a clear title and fill in the content, using simple formatting like headings, lists and links.
3. Publish across products. Reusable tabs appear on your product pages automatically, so you do not edit products individually.
4. Toggle as needed. Switch a tab on or off for seasonal or temporary content without deleting the text.

Keep tab titles short and predictable. “Shipping & Returns” and “Size Guide” read better than long sentences, and they line up neatly in the tab strip next to the native WooCommerce tabs.

Keeping Tab Content Safe and Tidy

Custom tab content is still HTML on your product page, so it should be sanitised rather than trusted blindly.

A well-behaved tabs tool limits what markup is allowed. The safe approach is to accept the same subset of HTML that WordPress permits in post content (links, lists, headings, bold and italic, images, blockquotes) and to strip anything unsafe such as scripts. Sanitising both when content is saved and again when it renders means a stray snippet pasted from elsewhere cannot break or compromise the page.

It also helps when tabs cooperate with the rest of your setup. Adding custom tabs after the native WooCommerce tabs, and after any tabs other plugins register, means nothing existing is reordered or replaced.

How Tabby Helps

For adding reusable custom tabs to WooCommerce, Tabby - Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce is built to do exactly this. You define your tabs once under WooCommerce, give each a title and content, and they appear on every product page after the native Description, Additional information and Reviews tabs.

Each tab accepts the safe HTML WordPress allows in posts (links, lists, headings, images and more), sanitised both on save and on output so scripts are stripped. You can switch any tab on or off without deleting it, and a disabled or empty tab is simply not shown. Because Tabby hooks the standard product tabs filter at a late priority, your native and third-party tabs keep their place, and your own tabs are added alongside them.