Adding an audio version to a WooCommerce store

A WooCommerce store is not a blog, yet it almost always contains one. Buying guides, advice articles, brand journal, product news: the editorial side of an online shop is often what brings visitors in from search, before they ever see a product page. That side is what benefits from being heard, and the good news is that there is nothing special to install.

WooCommerce is WordPress, so it's the same module

WooCommerce is a WordPress extension, not a separate system. Your shop is a WordPress site with a catalogue and a cart bolted on. The WordPress audio module installs on it exactly as it would on any other WordPress site: you add it from the admin, it detects your content, and it places a player without you touching the theme. If you've read how the player inserts itself without editing the theme, nothing changes here: the mechanism is identical, WooCommerce or not.

What the module writes into your database stays minimal, and it's the WordPress plugin that handles the link between a piece of content and its audio file. No interaction with the checkout flow, stock or payments: the module reads text and shows a button, it never goes near WooCommerce itself.

The real question: what to narrate in a shop

This is where WooCommerce asks for a decision an ordinary blog never forces on you. A shop has several families of pages, and not all of them make sense to the ear.

Your blog posts are the obvious candidates. A "how to choose a hiking tent" guide, a comparison, a deep dive on a material or a craft: these are continuous texts, read start to finish, often long, exactly the kind of content people listen to while cooking or walking. Turn audio on for them without hesitation.

Your product pages need more thought. A three-line description ("organic cotton T-shirt, straight cut, machine washable at 30 degrees") has no value as audio: a shopper scans that in a second, and hearing it read out only slows them down. A long product page, though, the kind used by brands that tell the story of a product, an artisan's work, or the detailed operation of a device, becomes editorial text again. There, audio has its place. The simple rule: if the description reads like an article, it listens like an article; if it's a list of specs, leave it silent.

Your flow pages (cart, checkout, account) are never narrated. There's nothing to read aloud there, and an audio player in the middle of a payment only distracts. The module doesn't touch them on its own, and that's by design.

The feed, so you don't think about it every time

A shop often publishes to the rhythm of collections and seasons. Rather than generating audio post by post, connect the RSS feed of your WooCommerce blog. New posts are picked up as they go live, the text is extracted, the audio generated, and you find the player online with no manual step. You keep publishing as usual, and the audio version follows.

For the long product pages you genuinely want narrated, it's better to handle them one at a time from your account, or to point at a dedicated feed if your theme exposes one for the catalogue. That saves you from accidentally producing audio for three hundred short pages that never needed it.

Accessibility, which isn't optional for a European retailer

One point deserves to be stated plainly for a shop. Since June 2025, the European Accessibility Act applies to e-commerce, and an online store above the relevant thresholds has to be accessible. Audio alone doesn't make a site compliant, and no honest vendor will claim it does, but it's one of the concrete answers: a spoken version of your content serves customers who are dyslexic, low-vision or visually tired. Our page on accessibility and WCAG sets out what the component does and doesn't do, without overselling.

Where to start

Install the module as you would on a plain WordPress site, turn audio on for your blog first, connect the feed, and watch what it does for two weeks before going further. You'll quickly see which product pages deserve the same treatment and which should stay silent. The detailed integration methods are in the documentation, and the most honest way to decide is to hear the player running on your own text: try it on an article and judge by ear. If you're on a different e-commerce platform, the principle is the same, as our guide to adding audio to a Shopify site shows.

Read next

• Headings, subheadings and lists: how the ear follows an article's structure
• Bold, italics, capitals: what text-to-speech doesn't hear
• Add an audio version to your HubSpot articles