SearchWP Blog

If you have a WooCommerce store and have thousands of products, then you’d want your website search to work without any trouble,

But what if it doesn’t?

It’s an absolute nightmare for any eCommerce website owner. The main problem is that there are several possible reasons that can cause the product search to not work.

In this article, we’ll talk about the most popular issues with search in WooCommerce and how to solve them.

Since this is a comprehensive article, here is a table of contents to help you navigate:

What Causes WooCommerce Product Search to Not Work?

WooCommerce is one of the best and most powerful eCommerce WordPress plugins. But, as with any other plugin, you may encounter errors when using it from time to time.

It’s especially frustrating when the errors are related to the product search. If the search on your website is broken, customers can’t find what they came for!

Unfortunately, there are plenty of reasons that can cause troubles with WooCommerce search.

Let’s look at the most common issues that can cause the WooCommerce product search to malfunction.

1. WooCommerce Product Search in Admin Isn’t Working

There is a fairly widespread problem when WooCoomerce shows products in the search results on a site but doesn’t display them in the admin panel.

Although this issue doesn’t affect customers, it causes considerable inconvenience to the site owner.

Can you imagine how it feels to manually search for the product you want to customize out of a thousand others?

To solve this problem, you first need to figure out what caused it. Here is the list of the most likely reasons:

• Plugin conflict: Plugin incompatibility can sometimes lead to problems with WooCommerce search.
• Mass product import via CSV: When you upload thousands of products to your site at once, it can corrupt the product database.
• Memory limit: If your hosting has strict memory limitations, it may cause problems with the WooCommerce search.

2. WooCommerce Products Don’t Display in Site Search Results

If products don’t show up in the search results on the site itself, then that’s a much bigger concern.

Customers are very likely to leave your store as soon as they use a search on your site and figure that it’s broken. To prevent that, it’s important to quickly understand what caused the problem and fix it.

The main reason why WooCommerce products don’t show up in on-site search results is because the default WordPress search is quite limited.

It will search for products, but might not show the right results to users. Plus, the default search doesn’t take into account additional product information while searching, which can cause items to not show up in the search results.

One way to solve this problem is by using a WordPress search plugin like SearchWP. You can customize the default search or create a custom engine that only searches WooCommerce products. 

If you’ve already done that, but the problem still persists, then it may be caused by the following reasons:

• Customized product visibility: If a particular product doesn’t show up in the search results, there’s a good chance you changed its default visibility.
• Cached search results page: If you’ve added products and haven’t cleared the cache, then it’s possible that an outdated version of your site is being displayed.
• Plugin compatibility issues: As in the case of a broken search in the admin panel, products may not appear in on-site search results due to plugin compatibility issues.

3. WordPress Doesn’t Search by WooCommerce Product Attributes

The default WordPress search isn’t that powerful when it comes to searching WooCommerce products. This also means that it won’t show any product attributes in the search results because WooCommerce stores them as custom fields.

To make them searchable, you’ll first need to get WordPress to consider the custom fields they contain.

That said, let’s look at some simple ways you can fix the WooCommerce product search on your site.

Fix WooCommerce Doesn’t Show Products in the Admin Panel

Here are different ways to get WooCommerce product search to work in the admin panel in WordPress.

Plugin Compatibility Issues

Installed any new plugins shortly before WooCommerce stopped displaying products in search results?

Disabling every plugin apart from WooCommerce will help to figure out if it’s the reason.

To do so, navigate to the Plugins tab in your WordPress dashboard.

Next, you can check the box at the top left to select all installed plugins at once.

This will help save time as you can perform bulk actions without having to deactivate each plugin individually.

After that, ensure you have unchecked the WooCommerce plugin.

From here, simply select Deactivate from the Bulk actions drop-down menu, and press Apply.

That’s it. You deactivated all the plugins you’ve installed except for WooCommerce.

Did the problem with the search disappear after these actions? Then gradually activate the plugins one by one until you find which one is causing the problem.

If WooCommerce still doesn’t display products in search results in the admin panel, then you can also try the following solutions below.

Mass Product Import via CSV

Have you recently imported a large number of products into WooCommerce? Then issues with search in the admin panel may be caused by database corruption.

To regenerate the database, navigate to WooCommerce » Status » Tools in your WordPress dashboard.

Once there, press the ‘Regenerate’ button in the Product lookup tables section.

After that, you’ll need to scroll the page to the very bottom.

From here, simply press the Update Database button.

Note that these operations may take some time to complete, depending on the number of products in your store.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, then try the following way.

First, navigate to Products » All Products in your WordPress dashboard.

From here, tick the topmost checkbox to highlight all products.

Then, select the Edit option from the Bulk actions drop-down menu.

Once that’s done, simply click Apply.

This will open the quick edit options for your products.

Simply click Update to update all your products at once.

These actions make WooCommerce include all products and begin displaying them in the search results in the admin panel as it’s supposed to be.

Server Memory Limit

Just launched your first WordPress site? Or moved your site to new hosting?

That could be a possible reason for issues with the WooCommerce search, especially if you have a lot of products.

The thing is that the server that hosts your site may not have enough power to handle a large number of WooCommerce products at once.

Or, the server may have software restrictions that limit the amount of available memory.

The best possible solution is to reach out to your hosting provider’s customer support. They’ll help you figure out if the issue with WooCommerce search is related to a server and solve it if it’s the case.

Fix WordPress Doesn’t Display WooCommerce Products

The best way to include WooCommerce products in your WordPress site search results is to use a plugin like SearchWP.

Beyond making WooCommerce products searchable, this plugin has many other valuable features.

Over 50,000 site owners use this best WordPress search plugin because of its features, such as:

• Automatic theme integration. You don’t need to be a tech-savvy user or edit any code to start using SearchWP. After installing, the plugin automatically integrates with all existing search forms on your site.
• Search activity tracking. Do you wonder what products your visitors search for on your site? SearchWP allows you to start tracking searches and get valuable insights into your audience’s interest.
• Search results in live mode. By default, WordPress shows search results by opening a new separate page. With SearchWP, you can display search results in live mode, providing your customers with a better user experience.

Now, let’s take a look at how to make WordPress display WooCommerce products in search results using SearchWP.

Step 1: Install and Activate SearchWP

The first step is to grab your copy of SearchWP here.

Once done, simply go over to the Downloads tab. Then, you can press the Download SearchWP button and save the plugin files to your computer.

Besides that, you should also copy your license key, as you will need it further to activate the plugin.

Once the download is completed, upload the SearchWP ZIP file to your WordPress site. If you need a help on how to do that, then feel free to check out this guide on how to install a WordPress plugin step-by-step tutorial.

Upon activation, you’ll see the SearchWP welcome screen and the setup wizard. Go ahead and click the ‘Start Onboarding Wizard’ button and follow the onscreen instructions.

That’s it. You’ve successfully activated SearchWP on your site.

Step 2: Install and Activate the WooCommerce Integration Extension

The next step is to install the WooCommerce Integration extension.

Simply head to SearchWP » Extensions and navigate to WooCommerce Integration. From here, click the Install button.

Once done, you’re ready to proceed to customize the default WordPress search engine.

Step 3: Add WooCommerce Products as a Search Source

To get started, you can go to SearchWP » Algorithm from the WordPress dashboard. Here you’ll find the list of search engines you currently have.

By customizing the default search engine, you can edit how the search works across the entire site. And if you want to add additional search engines and link them to specific search boxes, SearchWP allows you to do so, too.

The default search engine has only 3 sources: posts, pages, and media. It means that currently, WordPress does search exclusively among these 3.

To make WooCommerce products searchable, you need to add them as an engine source. To get started, first, click the Sources & Settings button.

Next, you’ll see the default sources for the engine, which includes posts, pages, and media.

Simply check the box next to the Products source, and then click Done at the bottom right.

After you’ve finished, press the Save button at the top right to save the changes.

That’s it. Now WooCommerce products appear in search results on your website.

Step 4: Test Your New Search

Let’s make sure that you can now find products through search.

To do so, simply visit your site and enter the name of any product you have in your store into the search box and click Search.

As you can see, WooCommerce products now appear in search results on our test site.

Customized Product Visibility

Did you add or edit a product, but it didn’t appear in the search results? There’s a good chance that you’ve accidentally changed its default visibility settings.

To figure that out, navigate to Products in your WordPress dashboard and click on the product whose visibility you’d like to change.

Then, make sure that the product’s catalog visibility option is set to Shop and search results.

You can find the option under the Publish metabox.

If it’s not the case, you’ve just found the reason why your product doesn’t appear in the search results.

To fix this, simply press Edit next to the Catalog visibility option. Then, change this parameter to Shop and search results or Search results only, depending on your needs.

Once done, you can press OK.

Then don’t forget to save the changes by clicking the Update button.

Cached Search Results Page

Do you use any caching plugins on your WordPress website? Your search results page may have simply been cached.

This problem can be solved in a couple of clicks by clearing your site’s cache. The exact steps depend on which plugin you’re using.

For this tutorial, we’ll show you how to clear the cache with one of the most popular WordPress caching plugins called WP Super Cache.

First, navigate to Settings » WP Super Cache from your WordPress dashboard.

After that, you’ll need to scroll down to the ‘Delete Cached Pages’ section.

Then, press the Delete Cache button to display updated versions of pages on your site.

Plugin Compatibility Issues

A plugin conflict can cause problems with displaying products in search results not only in the admin panel but also on the site itself.

To resolve this issue, you can simply deactivate all the plugins on your site (except WooCommerce).

Once that’s done, you can enable each plugin one at a time and check which one is causing the issue.

Fix WordPress Doesn’t Search by WooCommerce Product Attributes

The default WordPress search doesn’t include product attributes in the search process.

To fix this issue, the easiest solution is to use a search plugin like SearchWP.

Its WooCommerce extension lets you make products searchable in WordPress and include different attributes in the search process. For example, you can use product categories, tags, shipping classes, SKUs, product type, and other product details.

To learn more, you can see our guide on how to search eCommerce product details in WordPress.

Using the tips in this post, you can easily solve almost any problem with search in your online store. Properly working search is essential to getting more sales and growing your business.

We hope this article helped you learn how to fix WooCommerce product search not working. You may also want to see our guide on how to search in category in WooCommerce and how to add a custom WooCommerce search widget.

If you’re ready to make your WordPress site search WooCommerce products, then you can grab your copy of SearchWP here.