If you’re running a WooCommerce store, then you’ll probably have tags to organize your products.
But did you know that the default search on your site completely ignores them when performing a search?
By making tags searchable, you give your customers an extra way to search for products in your store and help them find what they’re looking for faster.
In this guide, we’ll show you the fastest way to enable search by WooCommerce product tags on your site with no coding needed.
Why Add Search by Product Tags
Allowing your visitors to search by product tags is helpful for several reasons.
First, tags are a great source of additional information about your products.
They are ideal for placing such data as product material, type, style, size, weight, and many other valuable attributes.
So, by making this data searchable, you can help your visitors discover your store and increase your sales.
Secondly, searching by tags is simply convenient.
For example, you can create a product collection and add a unique tag for it so that customers can find products from that collection faster.
With that, let’s see how you can make WooCommerce product tags searchable on your website.
How to Enable Search by WooCommerce Product Tags on Your Site
The easiest way to make WooCommerce product tags searchable on your site is to use a plugin like SearchWP.
SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin used by over 50,000 website owners worldwide.
Thanks to seamless integration with WooCommerce, you can use the full power of SearchWP to customize your store search.
For instance, you can make product attributes searchable, limit search to specific product categories, track searches of your customers, and many more.
And this is just a short list of SearchWP features. Here are some other things you can do with this plugin:
- Enable search by product SKUs: Let your customers search for products by SKU to help them find what they’re looking for faster.
- Exclude specific products from search: Clean up your search results by hiding redundant products to make it easier for visitors to find the right products.
- Restrict product search to titles only: Make WordPress only consider product titles when performing searches to reduce the amount of clutter in search results.
- Add a custom WooCommerce search widget: Create an additional search engine, customize it to your needs, and link it to the search widget on your site.
Now, let’s see how you can use it to enable search by WooCommerce product tags.
Step 1: Install and Activate SearchWP on Your Site
To begin, you’ll need to visit the SearchWP website and grab a copy of SearchWP.
After that, you can log in to your SearchWP account and click the Downloads tab in the dashboard.
Next, you’ll need to press the Download SearchWP button to download the plugin’s ZIP file to your computer.
After downloading, we recommend to also copy your SearchWP license key in the lower left corner.
Now, the next step is to install and activate the SearchWP plugin on your WordPress website. If you need help, then please check out this detailed guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once the plugin is active, you will see the SearchWP welcome screen and setup wizard. Go ahead and click the ‘Start Onboarding Wizard’ button and follow the onscreen instructions.
After activating the plugin on your site, the next step is to install the WooCommerce extension in SearchWP.
Step 2: Install WooCommerce Integration Extension
By installing this extension, you ensure seamless integration of SearchWP with WooCommerce.
To get started, navigate to SearchWP » Extensions from your WordPress dashboard.
From here, you can find the WooCommerce Integration extension and click Install.
After you’ve installed and activated the extension, you’re ready to start customizing your search engines to enable search by WooCommerce product tags.
Step 3: Add Products as a Search Source
To get started, you can head to SearchWP » Algorithm from the WordPress dashboard.
This is where you can manage your search engines created with this plugin. As you can see, there is already the Default search engine, which SearchWP automatically creates after installation.
You can simply customize this engine or add new ones as well. For instance, you can limit your search to WooCommerce products only, put specific products at the top of your search results, and more.
To let your customers search for WooCommerce products by tags, the first step is to add products as a search source.
First, you’ll need to click the Sources & Settings button.
Next, a new window will open where you can manage sources for your engine. For instance, the default sources will include Posts, Pages, and Media.
Go ahead and check the checkbox next to the Products search source to make it active.
When you’re finished, click Done to save your changes.
Step 4: Make Product Tags Searchable
The next step is to add the Product tags taxonomy as a product attribute that SearchWP pays attention to when performing a search.
To get started, simply click the Add/Remove Attributes button under the Product search source section.
After that, you’ll see a new window popup, where you can manage post attributes, like title, content, slug, excerpt, and author.
From here, you can click on the Taxonomies field and choose the Product tags option from the dropdown menu.
When you’re finished managing your taxonomies, click Done to save the changes.
The last step is to save your search engine. To do that, press the Save button.
That’s it. You’ve successfully enabled search by product tags on your site.
Let’s test your new search to make sure it works as it’s supposed to.
Step 5: Test Your New Search by Product Tag
To get started, go to your website and search for any product you have in your store by its tag.
For example, on our test site, we have a “Green hoodie” product with the “Womenswear” tag.
Let’s see if we can find this product by the tag only.
As you can see, we successfully found our product, even though there is no word “womenswear” in its title or description.
It means that WordPress now considers product tags, and visitors can use them to find the product they want.
Bonus: Fix WooCommerce Product Search Not Working
When your WooCommerce product search suddenly stops working, it can feel like a nightmare, especially when you have thousands of items in your store.
If customers can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll likely leave, which is the last thing any online store owner wants. The tricky part is that there isn’t just one single cause for a broken search.
The problem could be anything from a conflict with another plugin, a server memory limit issue, or even a corrupted database after a large product import using a CSV file.
The good news is that most of these issues are fixable. You can find all the details in our guide on how to fix WooCommerce product search not working.
We hope this article helped you learn how to enable search by WooCommerce product tags. You may also want to see our guide on how to make a smart WooCommerce product search and how to hide category from search in WooCommerce.
If you’re ready to empower your WooCommerce search, you can get started with SearchWP here.
