The Right Way To Display Product Descriptions On The Category Page

Many store owners want to display a short description for each product on the category page. As a solution I have seen designers create complicated scripts that loop through every individual product in the category to load the corresponding product page and extract the description. You know what that means? Sluggish page loads because you will be loading one additional page for every product. If you have 20 products on the page then that means you will be loading twenty pages.

It does not have to be this way. There is a simple solution to this problem and it can be found in the control panel. Follow the instructions below to enable product descriptions in your category pages and say good bye to sluggish page loads and complicated scripts.

Instructions

1. Login to your control panel and navigate to Setup & Tools > Store Settings

2. Choose the Display tab

3. Scroll down to Category Settings

4. Look for this setting: Category Display Mode

5. Select the Show Products in a List option

6. Save Changes.

7. That's it. No script needed.

How It Works

Here is a screen shot of the category list view with product descriptions:

If you want to display the products in a grid format then you just need to modify the CSS for the list.