How to improve
WooCommerce Product Search
[ Video Tutorial ]

Site search is key to eCommerce. A good WooCommerce search recommends products, guides you to choose what best suits your needs, understands what you mean even if you don’t articulate yourself precisely, and is very fast when it comes to finding the product or products you want.

Or at least that’s how things should be. ;D

30% of visitors to an online store use the site search, and those who search convert into sales between 4 and 6 times more.

Do you realize the importance of having a smart search for your WooCommerce store?

In this post we’ll tell you the options you have to improve the default product search engine for WooCommerce, step by step. And we’ll do so with a video that will guide you through the whole process so that you can implement it yourself with ease.

WooCommerce Product Search: What default features does the site search engine have?

If you manage an online store in WooCommerce, you are surely aware of the features that the platform offers when it comes to managing your eCommerce site in an agile, simple way. But as you may also know, the perfect platform hasn’t been invented yet, and WooCommerce is no exception. One of its few weaknesses is the default search engine it offers.

WooCommerce’s default search does not allow us to create synonyms, modify search results, use categories, or create advanced filters. In addition, it doesn’t provide relevant metrics such as the number of searches that return 0 results. It is precisely these features that allow us to improve the user experience in our online store and, at the same time, increase our sales.

Site Search for WooCommerce

Ajax Search for WooCommerce

There are other free plugins like Ajax Search for WooCommerce in the WordPress repository.

This is a plugin that fulfills its basic function, but does not help your website stand out from your competitors:

• It has no customization options.
• Its mobile version is not fully responsive.
• Its autocomplete function is quite slow because it does not depend on its own server, instead, it depends on yours and slows down yout website (at Doofinder we have a own server that makes the search results absolutely instant).
• It also doesn’t allow you to configure synonyms in its free version.

Doofinder: Plugin for WooCommerce 

Some of the advantages that we offer in Doofinder when compared to Ajax Search for WooCommerce are the following:

• Doofinder is fast and intuitive to install. de instalar.
• Support 24/7
• We offer easy installation via our Doofinder Plugin for WooCommerce (and also for other major eCommerce platforms like Magento, PrestaShop, and Shopify).
• Our search results are instant, as they rely on our own server.
• With our free 30-day trial you can access all our features for free and compare the results once you have installed our WooCommerce Product Search plugin.
• We allow for voice and image search.
• A responsive mobile version for all devices
• Custom WooCommerce search filters.
• You can insert search banners to be displayed based on certain searches or pinned for all searches.

Keep in mind that Doofinder uses Ajax technology to present the search results, offering great speed when presenting results without consuming server resources.

In this video, we explain how to install and configure the Doofinder search for Woocommerce in 5 minutes:

How to Install Doofinder for WooCommerce

In your site’s WooCommerce control panel, in the plugins tab, search for Doofinder. . You’ll see 2 plugins. Where it says “Doofinder for WooCommerce” click install.

Now you just have to click on the setup wizard.

You will see the following window with the 4 steps that will be necessary for the installer to help you to get Doofinder working correctly.

All you have to do is log in with your Doofinder account if you don’t have one, click on “sign up” and create an account in seconds.

From here on out, the installation process is completely automatic.

A progress bar will appear while all your products are being indexed. , Depending on the size of your product catalog, the process can take a few minutes.

Once the products are indexed, Doofinder will be activated automatically in your WooCommerce storeand you won’t have to do anything else.

You’ll see the following screen, and you’ll just have to click on “close” to have Doofinder working on your WooCommerce store.

Configure the WooCommerce search

Some of the Doofinder search layer options will be in the WooCommerce control panel. To see them, you just have to go to WooCommerce and in “Settings” you’ll have to look for the “Doofinder Search” tab.

From here, you can select some important options such as showing all variants of a product in the search results or, if you wish, adding new attributes to the catalog that has been indexed previously through the “data attributes” section.

Now that you have Doofinder installed and running, the search experience is going to be substantially better than with WooCommerce’s default search engine.

But you can still adjust your site search engine even more to meet your needs.

To do just that, go to Doofinder.com click login and log in with your account.

Search statistics for your eCommerce site

You will see the following screen inside the “Stats” window:

Here you’ll find Doofinder usage statistics, you’ll be able to see what your customers are looking for, how they are looking for it, and what products they are most interested in.

It is important for you to configure the order confirmation URL in the “conversion rate” box by clicking on the cogwheel settings button. Click the cogwheel button at the bottom of the
“Conversion rate”box.

Then just add the order confirmation URL for your WooCommerce store. This allows Doofinder to learn not only from searches but also from purchases.

Site Search opportunities, or zero results

Let’s take a closer look at this page and how it will help you improve your store.

When your potential customers start searching with Doofinder, the different charts will start showing search data.

• Top WooCommerce search opportunities:
  

Here you can see searches that Doofinder’s artificial intelligence has flagged as opportunities; they may be, for example, products similar to those you sell but that you currently do not have.

 

• “Sorry, no and there are results for this search,” is the feared message we should never display.
  

On average, the standard WooCommerce Product search returns zero search results for 15% of searches, while with Doofinder this metric is usually below 1%.

The goal is to get this graph as close to zero as possible. So, how do we do that?
So, how do we do that? Very easy 😉.

Synonyms and custom results for your WooCommerce Product Search:

• SYNONYMS: 

You can use the synonyms feature so that cwhen a user performs a search, several terms to refer to the same product are used. Let’s imagine that you have an international clothing store and sell shoes to everyone:

Depending on who is doing the searching and where the searches are done from, your users will search with one term or another. For example, in the USA and England, they don’t always use the same words to describe footwear: sneakers, trainers, plimsolls, tennis shoes, etc.

With Doofinder, there is a very simple way for you to configure this from the synonyms tab in your Doofinder control panel.

You just need to fill in the “terms” field with all the terms you want, separated by commas, and click “save”. From here, your site will yield the same search results for the terms “sneakers, trainers, plimsolls, tennis shoes, etc.”

• CUSTOM RESULTS:

A search with custom results is one in which we select both the products shown and the order in which they appear. Going back to the previous example of an international clothing store, let’s imagine that we sell shoes again.

But shoes by the brand “nike” have the greatest profit margin and, therefore, they are the ones that we are most interested in showing first. n this case, we go to the “Custom results” tab in the Doofinder control panel once again.

At the bottom of this page where it says “Included Items” we can intuitively select the order in which the results will appear. Remember that if a result appears first, it usually generates more clicks. And also down a little further, you will find the “excluded results” just in case you would like to hide some search results based on the same search for “Nike shoes.”.

With the features that we have just seen, it will be very easy for you to improve the search experience of your e-Commerce site, and these features are just the beginning. 😉

There are many different tools to improve your WooCommerce Product Search, but not all offer the same features and quality. At Doofinder, we have more than 10 years of experience in the field of site-specific search engines for eCommerce sites, and more than 10,000 customers worldwide. Likewise, in all these years we have not stopped innovating and improving the algorithm of our advanced product search engine for WooCommerce.

We have invested a lot of time, both in terms of features and in terms of the ease with which our solution can be integrated into your online store and, thus, eCommerce sites from around the world are already benefiting from our efforts.

If you want to know more about all the features (like the mobile version and image and voice search), click on login and discover them for yourself. 🙂

All these small “tricks” that we use at Doofinder tend to increase the sales on the average eCommerce site by between 10% and 20% from the first month of use of our WooCommerce Search

If you prefer, you can download our plugin here.