How to Remove the Shopping Cart Icon in WooCommerce

When it comes to eCommerce and WordPress, it’s hard to imagine the two without the WooCommerce platform popping into mind, too. The foremost WordPress plugin for powering online stores, WooCommerce offers tons of various options for your website. From setting up accounting to adding subscriptions to your shop, whatever you can imagine doing with your online store, chances are WooCommerce will help you do it. With so many features added to your website, you’re bound to want to find some superfluous, prompting you to look for solutions to, for example, remove the shopping cart icon in WooCommerce.

If you’re unhappy with the shopping cart icon that appears in your website’s menu when you install WooCommerce, you’re at the right place. We’ll discuss the offending icon, how it got there, and what you can do to remove it. So without further ado, let’s dive in!

Reasons to Remove the Cart Icon in WooCommerce

The WooCommerce cart icon is a staple in the navigation menu of many stores. Thanks to it, shoppers have a quick and easy method of accessing their shopping cart, but also checking how many items they’ve placed into the cart. Because this feature is so important for any shop, there are many shopping cart plugins that enhance and elevate the functionality.

However, many shop admins decide they don’t want the icon following the visitors wherever there’s a navigation menu on your website. Maybe having an icon in your website’s menu doesn’t fit its design. Maybe you want the cart to be represented by the word “cart” instead of an icon. Maybe the store section isn’t the central part of your website, and you want it to be more discreet.

The fact of the matter is that you get to choose what goes into the menu on your website. Whether the icon doesn’t fit the concept of your website’s design, or you just want the store to take the backbench while, for example, your content takes the center stage – you should be able to easily remove the cart icon in WooCommerce. However, that might not always be the case.

You should know that removing the shopping cart icon in WordPress might be a non-issue for many people who use WordPress and WooCommerce but don’t have a shopping cart icon added to their website’s menu. This is the reason why there are plugins such as WooCommerce Menu Cart, to allow people to add shopping cart icons in WordPress.

How to Remove the Cart Icon in WooCommerce

Whether or not you’ll have a WooCommerce shopping cart icon appear in your website’s menu will depend, to a large extent, on the theme you are using. Some of the most popular themes will simply add it, leaving you to disable it if you don’t want to use it. Other themes won’t add it, leaving you to scramble for one of those plugins you can use to enable the WooCommerce cart icon.

Remove the Icon Using Appearance Customization Options

So, if you’re using a WordPress theme that doesn’t stand in the way of the WooCommerce icon, you can do several things to make the icon disappear. First, you can go to Appearance > Customize and look for any option that refers to the menu cart, cart icon, or something along those lines. The exact naming of the option might depend on the theme you’re using for your website.

In our Qi Theme, for example, the cart icon is added as a widget to the heather widget area. If you want to remove it, you can navigate to Appearance > Customize > Widgets and delete the Qode Icon SVG widget.

With other themes, you might be looking for a different path altogether. Usually, Appearance > Customize > WooCommerce is a good place to start the search. You should be looking for a field you can check or uncheck to control how the cart icon displays. You might be able to change the icon, disable it when the cart is empty, or only show it when your store is viewed on certain types of devices. If at this point you don’t manage to find these options, navigating to the theme’s documentation page would help.

Alternative Ways to Remove the Shopping Cart Icon

In case you don’t have many options in the Appearance menu that could help you out, there are a couple of different things you can do. The first one would be to switch your WordPress theme to one that doesn’t display the icon. It’s possible, however, that it might be too drastic a measure.

In case you used a plugin to enable the shopping cart icon in the first place, you could probably solve the problem by uninstalling the plugin.

If neither of the two is a viable option, you’re left with using custom CSS. If you ever had to use custom CSS to hide an element, for example, a mobile menu, then you know the drill – you’ll be using the Inspect Element tool. Navigate to the website where the needless cart icon is visible. Right-click on it, and then choose the “Inspect” option. The icon element’s ID should be visible – copy it.

Next, navigate to your website’s backend, and then to Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS. There, you can stop the website from displaying the icon using the following piece of code:

name-of-cart-element {display: none !important; }

If it does the trick, you should see the difference right away in the live preview window. If it didn’t work, you might double-check the cart element ID. In case you got it right, but it still did nothing, you have no other recourse than to contact your theme developer’s support for help.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

WooCommerce is one of the most useful WordPress plugins and an irreplaceable asset for anyone who wants to create an online store using WordPress. Thanks to its great mix of core features and those that could be added later on, WooCommerce can easily be all you need to create and run a successful online store.

The shopping cart icon that’s sometimes displayed in the menu of stores that run on WooCommerce might be a welcome addition for some – but a nuisance for others. Removing the shopping cart in WooCommerce doesn’t have to be too hard, however – there are a couple of different ways you can do it, depending on what caused it and the theme you’re using it. Either way, this is one problem with WordPress that doesn’t have to bother you.