If you want your customers to be able to search and filter products in your WooCommerce store, you’ll need to use a plugin like WooSearch.
WooSearch product search and filters for WooCommerce gives your store added functionality such as being able to search for WooCommerce products by title, SKU, or even custom fields, and then lets you filter those products in real-time without needing to navigate away or to another page.
WooSearch also contains various other features, however, for this guide we’ll be purely focusing on how to search and filter products by custom attributes. Let’s get started.
How to install WooSearch Product Search & Filters for WooCommerce
After you’ve purchased and downloaded WooSearch, you first need to upload and install the WordPress plugin.
1. Navigate to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin
2. Click on Browse and select the ZIP file ‘product-search-and-filters.zip’
3. Click on ‘Install Now’
4. Finally, click on ‘Activate Plugin’
After you’ve activated the plugin, it will either automatically generate the JSON file of your products automatically in the background or run you through a wizard to do so if it detects your store has a very large number of products. Run through the process, and then head over to the settings. You can find this under WooCommerce > Search and Filters.
How to configure WooSearch Product Search & Filters for WooCommerce
Under ‘Search Settings’ click the sub-tab, ‘Fitler Settings’. Here you will see the option ‘Select attributes to display’. As soon as you click on the input, it will automatically detect and display all the custom attributes your store is using.
Now, simply click on all the attributes you want to be included in the sidebar filter that will be shown alongside the search. We’ll select all of the above options for the purpose of the tutorial.
Once you have selected all your WooCommerce custom attributes, go ahead and click ‘Save Settings’.
Tip: You’ll want to make sure that WooSearch is set to override the default WooCommerce search otherwise the plugin won’t function. To do this, simply navigate back to ‘Search Settings’ > ‘Smart Search’ and make sure that ‘Override WooCommerce Search’ is set to ‘Yes’.
Now navigate to the frontend of your website, and use your WooCommerce search bar to search for a product. You’ll notice that alongside the beautifully designed popup search, a selection of filters is presented below the categories.
When you select one of the attributes within the sidebar, the products will be filtered in real-time, making finding products on your WooCommerce store quicker and easier than ever before. You can test the demo yourself to see this in action.
That’s it. It’s that simple. You now have product search and filters for WooCommerce setup. There are a bunch of other options, and documentation on these can be found here covering all features.
Bonus tip: How to search by custom fields in WooCommerce search
WooSearch makes it easy to be able to search for products by title, SKU, description and even custom fields. This can be very handy if your store utilises custom fields. Let’s say you operate a book store and have a custom field for the author, and you want to be able to search by author, this is where this option really shines.
In our demo above, we’ve created two custom fields that are relevant for the phone demo.
Navigate back to ‘Search Settings’ > ‘Smart Search’ and scroll down until you see ‘Seach Parameter – Custom Fields’. The process is the same as for adding custom attributes. Simply click within the input and WooSearch will find and display all custom product fields. Now click and select the fields you want to be included.
Now navigate back to the frontend and search for one of your custom fields. In our scenario, we have added OLED and T-Mobile. When we search for one of these phrases, the relevant products are displayed. Neat, ay?
As you can see, WooSearch features a modern design, is flexible in its approach to display search or search and filters at the same time and contains a number of features designed to take the WooCommerce search experience to the next level.
Find out more about WooSearch and see how it can transform the way your customers find products.
