Prestashop Search not Working?
>> How to fix it <<

Is your search not working on your Prestashop eCommerce?

As most of you should know, the default internal search engine of Prestashop is not the best. In this post we will go through and check the most common problems with the Prestashop search and how to fix them.

The new version 1.7.6 is no better than older versions. I’m sure you have seen the inaccuracy in searches… even if the text is in the title of the product you want to show!

If it’s your first time using the default internal search of Prestashop, be ready for issues when indexing products, synonyms functionality, lack of intelligence in search, it’s speed… and much more!

We propose a solution for it! Start with Doofinder Site Search instead of the default Prestashop internal search will safe you a lot of time!

With Doofinder, you can set up your internal search in prestashop in under 10 minutes and you will be able to understand misspellings and synonyms, suggest complementary and best selling products, let your customers filter by colour, size, price and popularity…

Now, let’s start with the most common search issues in Prestashop

1. You can’t type long-tail searches

This issue is more common than expected. Sometimes you can see in some Prestashop stores that you are not getting relevant search results with certain searches.

For example, imagine you are on a technology website and you want to buy an iPhone Xs.

When you type: “iPhone” all search results are fine. But when you Type “Xs” after, instead of finding the iPhone XS, you get no results or still get the same results (only iPhone).

This is because you have the default “minimum word length (in characters)” set to 3. You should change this if you have this kind of searches.

To change it, you have to go to → Preferences → Search and below search → Index Settings. Here you will find the “minimum word length (in characters)”. Then change it for the correct number of minimum characters.

And after changing the number, you have to reindex again (Re-build the entire index).

Then you will have solved it.

2. Getting an error page when searching

This is a common problem when you regularly import or update a lot of products in your Prestashop catalogue.

Imagine you have 250 products and you are updating your products again and again regularly within a time period but you are not getting the correct results in your internal search.

To fix this issue what you need to do is: go to → preferences, then go to → Search

Then just below the search section, you will find the indexing section.

In the first paragraph you will find how many products are indexed and how many products are available in your store, the first number is the indexed products and the second the available products in your store. In the example you will see 19 out of 19 products.

That’s how this should appear. If you are seeing in your Prestashop that both numbers are different, here is where your problem lies. You should click on → Add missing products to the index

Then, they will be added to your indexed products.
You can also click on re-build the entire index, (the link below) but this is only recommended when you have at list 20.000 products. After doing this your search issue should be solved.

3. Faceted search is showing “home” product but no results in “category pages” 

Sometimes, you will find faceted filter is available only in one category and in other categories won’t be visible.

If this happens take a look at the filter configuration and try to disable and enable the categories, it’s a bug you can find in older versions of Prestashop.

If this doesn’t solve your issue try the followings steps:

1. Go to your faceted search module

2. Configure the module

3. Then go to the Edit Section: click on “categories used for this template” section, and take a look at all the subcategories where you want to display the filters.

4. Check the field: Filters → Sub-categories Filters → Yes

5. This should then be working on your Front End.

4. Search is not working in any other language

Sometimes, when you have your eCommerce in multiple languages you can have this issue.

The main problem when this happens is that people can’t find what they are looking for or they get a 404 error.

One of the most common problems that people have, is creating a database with the wrong collation settings. For example, if your language is Persian, and you don’t have it well configured. This is because you have the wrong collation settings on your database.

On almost every server the default collation is Latin1, if you are using the wrong collation on your Database, you will get errors when importing data with wrong characters and this will affect your internal search results.

If your shop is only in English you will not have problems, but as mentioned before for all other languages with special characters and accents (like Persian, Arabic…) Not having the right collation on your database is a big problem. Special characters with accents will be changed with wrong results.

If you want to run away from this issue you need to make sure your collation is: utf8_general_ci