"Not Visible Individually" products display on Frontend in Magento2.4

Question

Is there any way to display "Not Visible Individually" products on frontend?

My goal is admin can see product before upload in site...

Answer 1

There is no native way to display products with visibility 'Not visible individually'. That's the whole point of that visibility option. But you might workaround it and here are some ways to do it:

Method A. Create a pre-production/ staging environment and make all changes there and check them before replicating them on production environment.

Method B. You haven't mentioned which Magento edition you are using, so I am assuming you are using Open Source so content staging is not an option. But if you are using Commerce edition, it's definitely an option and the following methods described below should be ignored.

If none of the above are possible, see below:

Method C. If you want to check only the product details page, then you could make an almost 'invisible product':

1. Set the product with visibility 'Catalog'
2. Assign it only to the root category of your website
3. Access the product via direct URL by using the product url_key or the /catalog/product/view/id/<product_id> URL.

This will probably raise some problems if you use the product in an association like related products, upsells or cross-sells, as the product will more likely show up in the list of suggested products, so you should probably make sure those associations don't exist.

Method D. If you want to see how they might look on a category page, you could try using an almost 'invisible' category:

1. Set the product as visible in 'Catalog' only.
2. Assign it to a category that is enabled but not included in the menu or linked anywhere on the frontend and that only the admin knows how to access via direct URL. This way, your product won't show up in the search or in the catalog that the customers navigate.
3. Access the category directly with the category url_key or the /catalog/category/view/id/<category_id> URL.

HOWEVER, using methods C. will make the product show up in the sitemap and method D. will add also the category to the sitemap!

For the crawlers, you could create a custom layout update on that product and/or category to set NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW directions on the meta robots key add the product/ category as disallowed in robots.txt, but that won't make it go away from the sitemap (unless you write some code for that) and any user could find it and check the content if s/he will check the sitemap links.

So it's up to you which chances you are taking, my suggestion is to invest at least in a pre-production environment if possible.