How to Make a Smart WooCommerce Product Search

Do want to improve the product search in your WooCommerce store?

WooCommerce has a built-in search feature, but it’s not very good at finding products. By replacing it with a smarter and faster search, you can get more sales and improve the customer experience.

In this article, we will show you how to make a smart WooCommerce product search for your online store.

Why Add a Smart WooCommerce Product Search to Your Store?

WooCommerce has a built-in product search, but it is very limited.

It does not look for matches in product attributes, reviews, custom fields, or the product description. This can stop shoppers from finding products they want to buy on your online store, so you get fewer sales.

It’s also very slow, so impatient shoppers may leave your site.

Luckily, there are some excellent WooCommerce plugins that can create a smarter product search. This will allow you to show more helpful search results, fetch them faster, and get more sales.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add a smart WooCommerce product search feature to your online store.

How to Make a Smart WooCommerce Product Search

The easiest way to create a smart WooCommerce product search is by using SearchWP.

SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin on the market and puts you in complete control of the WordPress search algorithm. You can create your own relevance scale and adjust the algorithm without writing any code. In this way, you can show the right search results, to the right people, at the right time.

SearchWP can search content that the built-in WooCommerce search ignores such as PDFs and blog comments. It also comes with a WooCommerce addon so you can improve the WooCommerce product search too.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the SearchWP plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to head over to the Settings » SearchWP page and click on the ‘License’ tab to enter your license key.

You can find this information by logging into your SearchWP account or checking your purchase confirmation email.

Next, you need to install and activate the WooCommerce Integration extension. In your WordPress dashboard, go to SearchWP » Extensions.

Here, find the WooCommerce Integration extension and click on its ‘Install’ button.

Once you have the extension, you’re ready to create a custom search engine for your WordPress blog. This gives you complete over the content that SearchWP looks at, and how it shows the results to shoppers.

To get started, go to Settings » SearchWP. Then, click on the ‘Sources & Settings’ button.

This will open a popup where you can tell SearchWP what content to include in its searches.

Since we want to improve the WooCommerce search, check the box next to ‘Products.’

WooCommerce product reviews are stored as comments. If you want to make reviews searchable, then you should also check the ‘Comments’ box.

After that, click on the ‘Done’ button to close the popup. Now, if you scroll down you’ll see a new ‘Products’ section.

By default, SearchWP will look at the product title, content (description), slug, and excerpt (short description) for matches. Depending on how your site is set up, you may be able to search other content by clicking on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.

This will open a popup where you can check different boxes or select custom fields and taxonomies. If you enabled ‘Comments’ in the previous step, then you’ll also be able to search product reviews.

In the following image we’ve added ‘color’ and ‘size’ as custom fields, and product tags in the taxonomies field. SearchWP will now search each product’s color, size, and tags.

When you’ve selected all the product attributes you want to use, click on ‘Done.’

Each attribute has a ‘Attribute Relevance’ slider that changes how the search engine values and ranks your products. For example, if you want to value the product title higher than the product slug, then you can adjust the slider accordingly.

When you’re happy with the search engine settings, make sure to click on ‘Save Engines.’

SearchWP will now start rebuilding your search index in the background. After that, the plugin will be ready to start delivering more relevant search results to your WooCommerce store.

If your WooCommerce theme already has a search box, then you don’t need to make any changes. If your theme doesn’t have a search box, then you can see our guide on how to add a search bar to the WordPress menu.

After that, head over to your store and try out the search feature. You should notice that it’s returning more accurate and helpful search results.

By default, SearchWP will include all matching products in its search results. However, you may wish to specify which products should or should not be displayed. For example, you might only display products that are on sale or come with free shipping, as this can get you more sales.

To learn more, please see our guide on how to customize WooCommerce product search results page.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily make a smart WooCommerce product search for your online store. You may also want to see our pick of the best business phone services and how to create an email newsletter.

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