Would you like to know how to make a smart WooCommerce product search?
Having a smart search is essential if you want your customers to easily find what they’re looking for.
In this article, we’ll show you the best way to make a smart WooCommerce product search without writing any code.
What is a “Smart” Product Search in WooCommerce?
It’s hard to call the default WordPress search engine a smart one as it has a lot of weak points.
To begin with, it doesn’t search for WooCommerce product attributes.
The thing is that WooCommerce stores products and their attributes as posts and custom post fields, respectively.
But the native WordPress search engine only indexes titles, descriptions, and excerpts of posts and pages.
That’s why it doesn’t see and consider any product attributes while performing a search.
Product attributes include features such as product size, color, price, and other details you would like to add.
So making them searchable is essential if you want to provide your customers with the most relevant search results.
Another thing that prevents you from calling WordPress search “smart” is the fact that it shows search results on a separate page.
Most customers expect to see real-time search results on your site as they’re used to it by browsing other sites.
On top of that, even though WordPress is the best blogging platform, it lacks many basic features when it comes to search.
For example, you can’t impact the search results order, enable partial matches, and many more.
So, in this article, we’ll show you how to make a smart WooCommerce product search for your site.
Namely, we’ll talk about:
- How to Add a Custom WooCommerce Search Widget
- How to Add a WooCommerce Search Form to Your Shop Page
- How to Search By WooCommerce Product Attributes
- How to Search in WooCommerce Category
- How to Add Fuzzy Search to Your Website
- How to Prioritize Specific Products in Search Results
- How to Exclude Specific Product from Search Results
Why Add a Smart WooCommerce Product Search to Your Store
Your income as an online store owner directly depends on your visitors’ ability to find the products they’re looking for.
That’s why it’s essential to ensure that this process is as straightforward as possible.
One of the best ways to do so is to add a smart WooCommerce product search to your store.
Here are just some of the benefits it brings:
- More sales. The easier it is for your customers to find a product they’re looking for, the more sales you’ll make.
- Better user experience. A customer who has had a great user experience exploring your site is more likely to come back again.
- SEO boost. User satisfaction is one of the major ranking factors in Google. Adding a smart search lets you increase pageviews and reduce the bounce rate on your site, making it rank higher.
Now, let’s take a look at how you can add a smart product search to your WordPress site.
How to Make a Smart WooCommerce Product Search
The easiest way to make a smart WooCommerce product search in your store is to use a plugin like SearchWP.
As the best WordPress search plugin, SearchWP gives you full control over your site search.
Over 30,000 WordPress site owners already use it to deliver better search results to their visitors.
Using this plugin, you can boost product discoverability and increase the number of sales.
Here are other things you can do with SearchWP:
- On-site search activity tracking. Would you like to look at what your customers are searching for on your site? SearchWP tracks your visitors’ searches and allows you to view them directly in your WordPress dashboard.
- Exclude pages from search results. Are there any unwanted pages in the current search results on your site? SearchWP allows you to hide them in just a few clicks.
- Prioritize specific search results. Launching a new product and want as many people as possible to notice it? Put it at the top of your store’s search results with SearchWP.
- Enable fuzzy search. Do you want customers to find the right product even if they make a typo? Simply turn on fuzzy search in the SearchWP settings.
Now, let’s take a look at how to add a smart WooCommerce search to your online store using SearchWP.
The first step is to grab your copy of the SearchWP plugin here.
Once done, go to the Downloads tab in your SearchWP account dashboard.
After you get there, press the Download SearchWP button to save the plugin ZIP file to your computer.
Then, copy the license key at the same tab as you’ll need it soon to activate SearchWP.
Once the download is finished, the next step is to upload the SearchWP plugin ZIP file to your site.
Need a refresher on how to do that? Feel free to check out the step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
After you get SearchWP installed on your site, the next step is to activate your license.
To do so, navigate to the SearchWP settings by clicking the SearchWP button at the top panel of your WordPress dashboard.
Then, go over to the License tab.
Paste the license key you copied earlier into the License field and press Activate.
After you’ve installed and activated your copy of SearchWP, it’s time to install the WooCommerce Integration extension.
This extension ensures seamless integration of SearchWP and WooCommerce, allowing you to easily customize how search works in your store.
You can grab the extension at the WooCommerce Integration extension download page.
Once you get there, press the Download Extension button.
After the download is finished, install the extension the same way as the SearchWP plugin.
Once you’ve installed the WooCommerce Integration extension, you’re ready to start making smart WooCommerce product search on your site.
How to Add a Custom WooCommerce Search Widget
Would you like to add a custom WooCommerce search widget to your site? It’ll help your visitors find the products they’re looking for faster.
For example, you can limit this widget to search only for specific product categories. Or make it consider specific product tags, like refurbished or bestseller.
Using SearchWP, you can easily create and add a custom WooCommerce search widget to your store.
The first step is to add a new customized search engine.
To get started, click the SearchWP button at the top panel of your WordPress dashboard.
Then, press the Add New button to add a new search engine that you’ll be customizing.
After that, there will appear the Supplemental search engine that you can customize to meet your needs.
For more details, follow our step-by-step guide on how to add a custom WooCommerce search widget.
How to Add a WooCommerce Search Form to Your Shop Page
Do you want to add a WooCommerce search form to your shop page? That’s a great way to boost your sales and allow visitors to navigate your store faster.
Using SearchWP, you can add a fully featured WooCommerce search form to your shop page within a few simple steps.
For more details, see our guide on how to add a WooCommerce search form to your shop page.
How to Search By WooCommerce Product Attributes
Would you like to make your WordPress site search by WooCommerce product attributes?
To do so, go to the SearchWP settings and open the Engines tab.
Here you’ll find the list of all your search engines. You can control how the search works on your site by customizing them.
For example, you can add or remove search sources and attributes, change their relevance weight, and many more.
SearchWP allows you to have multiple search engines and link them to specific search bars on your site.
As we want to add smart search to the entire site, we’ll be editing the default search engine. All the changes we made to it will affect all the search bars throughout your site.
As you can see, our default search engine currently searches only for posts, pages, and media.
To make WordPress consider WooCommerce products when searching, we need to add them as a search source.
To do that, click the Sources & Settings button.
Tick the checkbox next to the Products source and press Done.
WooCommerce stores all the additional product data such as its price, weight, color, SKU, and so on as custom fields.
So, to make this data searchable, we need to add custom fields as an attribute to the Products source.
To do so, press the Add/Remove Attributes button in the Products section.
Then, click on the Custom Fields drop-down menu and select the Any Meta Key shortcut.
By adding this shortcut, you make all product attributes searchable.
If you want to make only a specific attribute searchable, such as price, enter its name in the Custom Fields field.
Also, if you click on the Taxonomies drop-down menu, you can select which taxonomies you want WordPress to consider while doing a search.
A taxonomy is something that groups products together. For example, it might be a product type, tag, category, and so on.
When you finish adding custom fields and taxonomies, click Done.
As you can see, our newly added Any Meta Key attribute currently has the lowest relevance weight possible.
It means that WordPress will consider it in the last order while performing a search.
Since we don’t want this to happen, we move the slider next to the Any Meta Key attribute all the way to the right.
Here is how it should look:
When you finish, don’t forget to click the Save Engines button at the top right once again.
That’s it. Now your WordPress site supports search by WooCommerce product attributes.
How to Search in WooCommerce Category
Would you like to let your customers search by a specific category? That’s super convenient and allows them to find products much faster.
Using SearchWP, you can easily limit specific search forms to search by specific categories or create a category select search form.
This way, you can provide your customers with more relevant search results and boost your sales.
For more details, see our detailed tutorial on how to search in WooCommerce category.
How to Add Fuzzy Search to Your Website
Do you want to make it even easier for your customers to find a product they’re looking for?
You can do that by enabling fuzzy search.
This feature allows you to make WordPress search for partial matches. It ensures that your customers can find a product they’re looking for even if they make a typo in its name.
For example, if while searching for marshmallows they misspell it as “marshmellows”, they still will find this sweet product.
Using SearchWP, you can enable fuzzy search just by selecting a single checkbox.
For more details, see our step-by-step tutorial on how to add fuzzy search to your WordPress site.
How to Prioritize Specific Products in Search Results
Would you like to bring some of your products to the top of the search results on your site?
This is a great way to promote new products and increase the number of sales.
With SearchWP, you can prioritize specific products in the search results for certain search terms within minutes.
The first step is to install the SearchWP Custom Results Order extension.
You can grab it at the Custom Results Order extension download page.
Once there, press the Download Extension button and save the extension’s ZIP file to your computer.
When you finish the download, install and activate the extension the same way as SearchWP.
For more details, check out our detailed guide on how to prioritize specific search results in WordPress.
How to Exclude Specific Product from Search Results
Are there some products or pages you’d like to remove from search results on your site?
This helps you avoid cluttering search results and give your customers more relevant matches.
SearchWP allows you to exclude any pages, posts, or WooCommerce products from search results with just a few clicks.
To begin with, make sure that you’ve installed the Exclude UI extension.
You can grab it at the Exclude UI extension download page.
Once you’ve navigated to the page, click the Download Extension button.
When the download is complete, install and activate the extension the same way as SearchWP.
For more details, follow our guide on how to exclude pages from site search results in WordPress.
In this article, you learned how to make a smart WooCommerce product search. It’ll help you drastically increase sales and make your customers’ user experience much better.
If you’re ready to add a smart WooCommerce product search to your site, you can grab your copy of SearchWP here.
Would you like to enable search by products SKU? Check out this how to search by SKU in WooCommerce step-by-step tutorial.
Are you wondering if there is a way to limit search to product titles? Follow the how to restrict WooCommerce product search to title only tutorial.
