WooCommerce Search Engine

WooCommerce Search Engine Plugin

Online shopping is all about convenience, and an efficient search functionality plays a vital role in providing a seamless shopping experience. DevTools Club presents the WooCommerce Search Engine plugin, a feature-rich solution that enhances your WooCommerce store’s search capabilities. By offering a fast and accurate search experience, this plugin makes it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for, ultimately boosting your sales and conversions.

Key Features of the WC Search Engine

The WooCommerce Search Engine plugin offers seven main features that work together to provide a superior search experience for your customers:

1. Cached and Fast Search Suggestions: The plugin offers cached product, category, and taxonomy suggestions without relying on AJAX or server-side loading, ensuring a fast and responsive search experience.
2. Featured/Pinned Products and Categories Block: Showcase your featured or pinned products and categories in the live search suggestions box, increasing visibility and promoting specific items.
3. Trending Products Block: Display trending products in the live search suggestions box to highlight popular items and encourage purchases.
4. Recently Visited Products Block: Show individual visitors a personalized list of their recently viewed products in the live search suggestions box, increasing the chances of a sale.
5. Backend Search Feature: Improve search consistency by forcing your theme to display the same smart search results in both the live search box and backend search results.
6. Search Analytics: Gain insights into your customers’ search behavior and make data-driven decisions to optimize your store.
7. Helpful Search Messages: Offer guidance to users with messages like “type any text you want: e.g., child shoes,” or “no matches found” in the search suggestions box.

Installation and Activation

To install and activate the WooCommerce Search Engine plugin, follow these simple steps:

1. Unzip the downloaded file and copy woo-search-box.zip to your wp-content/plugins directory.
2. Unzip the file.
3. Go to Dashboard/Plugins and activate the plugin.
4. Navigate to “Dashboard/WooCommerce/Search Engine” to configure the plugin.

Quick and Simple Usage Guide

For a quick setup without any additional configuration, follow these steps:

1. Click “Rebuild the Cache” to enable live search suggestions based on your main product data.
2. Optionally, you can choose additional attributes from the “Search by more data” list in the “Data Building” tab and select the 2nd or 3rd option in the “Backend Search” tab. Save the settings and click “Rebuild the Cache” to enable live search suggestions based on your main product data, attributes, and taxonomies.

Building and Automating Cached Search Data

After opening the “Dashboard/WooCommerce/Search Engine” admin page, the default settings will be automatically configured. Click “Rebuild the Cache” to build your first cached data. You can also automate the cache building process with a simple schedule in the “Data Building” tab.

Customizing Initial Texts, Blocks, and Automatic Typo Resolver

The plugin allows you to enable, disable, and configure initial texts, featured products & categories block, recently viewed products block, trending products block, and search by category/taxonomy names block. Additionally, you can enable the automatic typo resolver, which recognizes visitors’ typo mistakes and displays relevant products.

Advanced Settings and Customization

For users with HTML and CSS experience, the plugin offers layout customization, custom CSS, and more. You can customize the suggestion box UI by using the provided CSS class names. If you lack experience in this area, you can simply skip this feature.

Here is a sample image that shows correctly filled advanced settings and a list of the main CSS selectors of the plugin for easy customization:

• .guaven_woos_suggestion – the main container
• .guaven_woos_final_results – results container
• .guaven_woos_init_text li – initial text
• .guaven_woos_suggestion_list – product row
• .guaven_woos_titlediv – product name container
• .guaven_woos_titlediv span – product name
• .guaven_woos_titlediv – product price
• .guaven_woos_img – product image
• .guaven_woos_showallli – show all button
• .guaven_woos_suggestion_catul – category container
• .guaven_woos_suggestion_list – category row
• .guaven_woos_titlediv_cat – category name
• .guaven_woos_suggestion_trend – trending products container
• .guaven_woos_suggestion_populars – popular products container

WPML Integration for Multilingual Stores

If you’re using WPML for a multilingual store, you’ll need to build the cache for each language and translate the plugin strings (initial texts and block titles) using simple XML texts provided by WC Search Engine.

Backend Search

The backend search feature works on a cookie-based algorithm, which ensures that backend search results are smart and consistent with the live search suggestions. Just check the checkbox, save settings, and it will be enabled.

Smart Price Expressions

With this feature, you can create working smart expressions for product prices, such as “100$ smartphone,” “$100 smartphone,” “smartphones around 150$,” or “smartphones under 500 USD.”

Search Analytics

Enable search analytics by clicking the ANALYTICS button on the right side and then enabling the feature.

WP Filters

The WooCommerce Search Engine plugin offers numerous filters for developers to further customize the plugin’s behavior and appearance. These filters allow you to modify WP_Query, WP_Term queries, add custom hidden data, modify SQL queries, and more.