Removing product tag taxonomy in WooCommerce

The “product_tag” taxonomy is something that we rarely need to use in our WooCommerce projects. When it’s not used, we remove it to keep the admin interface clean. Clutter decreases usability and things in WP admin that actually don’t work can confuse even technical users.

The problem is that getting rid of product_tag taxonomy is not so easy.

Naive approach (don’t do this):

<?php

add_action('init', function() {
    unregister_taxonomy('product_tag');
}, 100);

If you just unregister it, WooCommerce will start throwing warnings in strange places (such as the REST API). Apparently, the existance of product_tag taxonomy is hardcoded deep in WooCommerce core.

A better approach is to just hide it.

<?php

/**
 * Overwrite product_tag taxonomy properties to effectively hide it from WP admin ..
 */
add_action('init', function() {
    register_taxonomy('product_tag', 'product', [
        'public'            => false,
        'show_ui'           => false,
        'show_admin_column' => false,
        'show_in_nav_menus' => false,
        'show_tagcloud'     => false,
    ]);
}, 100);

/**
 * .. and also remove the column from Products table - it's also hardcoded there.
 */
add_action( 'admin_init' , function() {
    add_filter('manage_product_posts_columns', function($columns) {
        unset($columns['product_tag']);
        return $columns;
    }, 100);
});

And that’s all you need to do!