SearchWP

WooCommerce Legacy Instructions

These instructions are considered deprecated. Please use the official WooCommerce extension instead

WooCommerce uses what can be considered it’s own internal search mechanism that kind of hijacks post type archives. You’ll notice that after searching, the URL has &post_type=product appended to the end.

This is why your search results have not changed; SearchWP is not in use when you visit CPT archive pages.

In order to resolve this issue, you need to remove a hidden input that WooCommerce injects into your search forms. To do so, you need to create a new file in your theme directory named product-searchform.php with the following:

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/'  ) ); ?>">
    <div>
        <label class="screen-reader-text" for="s"><?php _e( 'Search for:', 'woocommerce' ); ?></label>
        <input type="text" value="<?php echo get_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s" placeholder="<?php _e( 'Search for products', 'woocommerce' ); ?>" />
        <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="<?php echo esc_attr__( 'Search' ); ?>" />
    </div>
</form>

See their documentation for additional information.

Once you have that file in place and you submit a search you will see that your search results have improved, but the results template doesn’t look like it did. That again is due to WooCommerce using a CPT archive template for search results. To get the WooCommerce product-focused search results back in place, copy

~/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/archive-product.php

to your theme folder and rename it as search.php. This is now your search results template, you can customize it in any way that you’d like.

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See what SearchWP customers have to say

  • “SearchWP combines an incredible amount of flexibility with a design that makes it easy to use. Its power lies in the near infinite level of customization. Literally every aspect of your content can be assigned a level of importance.”

  • “The power, control, and best-practices coding approaches upon which SearchWP is built make it the best search feature replacement for WordPress I have ever implemented. The people behind this plugin are simply outstanding, and have earned my loyalty.”

  • “I purchased SearchWP for its ability to search inside more than 100 PDF documents on my website. My site visitors are able to see search results with pages, posts and PDFs weighted in my preferred order. Customer support has been very helpful.”