WooCommerce does not track what a shopper looked at and show it back to them. “Related products” and upsells are based on categories and tags you set manually, not browsing history. If you want a genuine recently viewed products section on your store, you need a plugin, and only a handful actually do this well. This post compares three real options: Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce, MATE Recently Viewed Products, and Good Team Recently Viewed Products, on price, caching behavior, and setup. If your site runs full-page caching, skip ahead to MATE. If you want analytics and win-back emails along with the feature, Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce is the one to install.
| Plugin | Best for | Price | Last updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce | Full feature set: analytics, win-back emails, Elementor widget | Free | June 26, 2026 |
| MATE Recently Viewed Products | Sites running full-page caching (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, a CDN) | Free | June 14, 2025 |
| Good Team Recently Viewed Products | A quick, no-frills cookie-based widget | Free, full version $39 on the vendor’s own site | April 29, 2026 |
Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce
Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce is the most complete of the three, and it shows in how many places it can put the recently viewed section: a shortcode, automatic placement on the single product page, a sidebar widget, a Gutenberg block with a live server-side preview, and a native Elementor widget.
- Price: Free
- Requires: WordPress 6.0+, PHP 7.4+
- Last updated: June 26, 2026
What sets it apart isn’t the display options, it’s the tracking engine underneath. Guests get a first-party cookie (it only stores product IDs, nothing else). Signed-in customers can optionally get database-backed history that follows them from their phone to their laptop, merged from the guest cookie at login and pruned on a schedule you set. On top of that it keeps a store-wide “most viewed” stat and can automatically email inactive signed-in customers the products they looked at, with an auto-generated single-use coupon attached. That is a genuine cross-sell feature, not just a UI widget.
Setup is standard WordPress: install from Plugins > Add New, activate, then go to Recently Viewed > Settings to pick a layout (grid, list, or a dependency-free carousel), choose where it shows on the product page, and turn on cross-device tracking or emails if you want them. The Recently Viewed > Analytics screen shows your most-viewed products once there’s data to show.
The honest tradeoff: with cross-device history, an analytics screen, and automated emails all running, there’s more going on under the hood and more settings to understand than the other two. If all you want is a plain “you looked at this” strip, it is more plugin than the job strictly needs, though none of that extra machinery is forced on you.
MATE Recently Viewed Products
MATE Recently Viewed Products exists for one reason: full-page caching breaks a naive recently viewed feature. If a plugin reads a PHP session to know what you viewed, and your cache serves the same static HTML to every visitor, everyone ends up seeing the same “recently viewed” list, or none at all. MATE avoids that by storing views in a cookie and loading the actual product grid through AJAX after the cached page has already been served, so the cached HTML itself never has to change per visitor.
- Price: Free
- Requires: WordPress 5.0+, PHP 7.2+
- Last updated: June 14, 2025
Beyond the caching angle, it’s deliberately simple. You get a Gutenberg block and a [mrvp_recent_products] shortcode, and both can override the plugin’s global settings per instance, like the title, how many products to show, and whether to show the price or excerpt. There is no separate classic widget, and there is no store-wide analytics or email feature; it does the one job and stops.
Setup is a manual upload (or install from the plugins screen), activate, then Settings > MATE – Recently Viewed Products for the defaults, and drop in the shortcode or block wherever you want it to render.
The limitation worth flagging plainly: it hasn’t shipped an update since June 2025, which puts it at over a year without a release as of this writing. The caching approach still works regardless of age since it doesn’t depend on anything WooCommerce or WordPress core is likely to change underneath it, but a plugin that has gone quiet this long is worth testing carefully on a staging site before you rely on it, and you should check its support forum for open compatibility reports first.
Good Team Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce
Good Team Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce is newer than the other two and takes the same cookie-based, no-PHP-session approach as MATE, which its own FAQ states directly: it is built to work with caching and Cloudflare because it never touches PHP sessions.
- Price: Free (lite version), full version $39 on the vendor’s site
- Requires: WordPress 6.0+, PHP 8.0+
- Last updated: April 29, 2026
The free version gives you a shortcode and a classic widget, configured from a dedicated “Good Team Recently Viewed” admin menu. That’s the whole feature set: no Gutenberg block, no Elementor widget, no analytics. The vendor’s own site lists a paid, full version at $39 with more display and configuration options, though the listing doesn’t say whether that’s a one-time purchase or an annual license, so confirm that before buying.
Installation is the standard three steps: upload or install through the Plugins screen, activate, then configure from its own admin menu. Place the output with [gtrvp_recently_viewed] for the shortcode or the widget for a sidebar or footer slot.
Two honest limits to know going in: the free version hard-caps output at 4 products through the shortcode and 2 through the widget, and it is new enough (first seen active in early-to-mid 2026) that it does not have much of a track record yet. The PHP 8.0 requirement is also the strictest of the three, which rules it out on older hosting setups where MATE or Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce would still run fine.
How to pick
- If you want analytics on what gets viewed most, plus automated win-back emails for shoppers who looked and didn’t buy, use Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce.
- If your site runs WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, or sits behind a CDN, and you’ve seen a “recently viewed” section show stale or identical results before, use MATE Recently Viewed Products.
- If you just need a basic widget or shortcode and don’t mind a newer plugin with less history, Good Team Recently Viewed Products covers it, as long as your host runs PHP 8.0 or newer.
- If none of the free limits work for you, more than a handful of products, a block instead of a widget, or tracking tied into your own CRM or email platform, that’s a custom build rather than a plugin-shopping problem.
FAQ
Does WooCommerce show recently viewed products by default?
No. WooCommerce’s native related products and upsells are based on categories, tags, and settings you configure manually, not on what a shopper actually clicked on. Showing real browsing history needs a plugin.
Will a recently viewed products plugin break my page cache?
Only if it’s built around PHP sessions, which forces WordPress to treat every page as uncacheable. MATE and Good Team Recently Viewed Products are both built specifically to avoid that by using cookies and AJAX instead. Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce also lists compatibility with WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and LiteSpeed Cache.
Can guests see their recently viewed products, or only logged-in customers?
All three track guests by default through a browser cookie. Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce is the only one of the three that also offers optional database history so a signed-in customer’s list follows them across devices.
Where should the recently viewed section go on the product page?
Most stores place it after the product tabs or reviews, so it doesn’t compete with the add-to-cart button. Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce has a setting for this placement; with the other two, it depends on where you put the shortcode or block.
Do any of these work with Elementor or the block editor?
Recently Viewed Products for WooCommerce ships both a Gutenberg block and a native Elementor widget. MATE has a Gutenberg block and a shortcode but no Elementor widget. Good Team Recently Viewed Products is shortcode and classic widget only, with no block.
A recently viewed section is one piece of a bigger product-page conversion puzzle. If you’re working through that puzzle more broadly, we’ve also compared WooCommerce quick view plugins for faster browsing, and back in stock notification plugins for re-engaging shoppers after a stockout. None of our own plugins happen to cover this specific feature, but we’ve built custom browsing-history and personalization logic directly into client stores before, including a full WooCommerce build for Kayzur. If you want a version without the free-tier limits above, unlimited products, server-side tracking that doesn’t depend on a cookie surviving, or history tied into your own CRM, that’s a job for our Plugin Development team rather than another plugin install. For WooCommerce work beyond this one feature, our WooCommerce development team handles the rest of the store too.
