WooCommerce: Customize Product Search Form HTML

The “Search products…” WooCommerce form usually appears in the website header and/or the Shop page sidebar based on your theme settings and widget setup.

It usually features an input form with a magnifying glass icon (unless your theme customizes it via CSS), without a visible search button, and on enter it redirects users to the search result page.

Case study: most WooCommerce Ajax Search plugins target the WooCommerce product search form input, so that when you start typing, the “instant search results” window pops up. However, I needed to disable this behavior on certain subsites/languages and the only workaround here was to add a class to the search form input, so that I could target it in my Ajax plugin selector exclusions.

Even if the above scenario is very unlikely, the challenge is still valid. So, how do we customize the HTML of the “Search products…” WooCommerce form (so, not the CSS, but the actual HTML output)? Let’s go!

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WooCommerce Development: 8 Trends & Advancements

In the sphere of WooCommerce development, innovation continues at a breakneck pace, so it’s important for businesses to stay updated on current trends and advancements.

From enhancing in-app customer support solutions to embracing AI (Artificial Intelligence), sustainability practices, and voice search optimization, the future is packed with possibilities. 

To improve your understanding of what lies ahead, read on as we provide you with insightful knowledge about significant trends shaping this field.

Our goal is to make you learn at least one new thing about the future of WooCommerce and the ecommerce ecosystem – feel free to share what that is in the comments!

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WooCommerce: Search Products By Custom Field (Backend)

In WooCommerce, there are two kinds of search: the customer one (frontend) and the admin one (backend). We’ve already covered how to let customers search into custom field values on top of the default product title and description, so this time we’ll talk about the backend search.

Let’s say, as a WooCommerce store admin, that you’ve added a product custom field (e.g. “gtin“), and you want to make sure the backend search also returns products where “gtin” is equal to the search term. The snippet below will help you do that. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Search Products By SKU (Frontend)

The frontend WooCommerce product search, for some reason, doesn’t work for SKU values. If it does, then your theme developers were smart enough to include this in their code, because this is a big problem especially for B2B stores.

Today, we’ll study how to alter the product search query, as well as the wc_get_product_id_by_sku() function, which is super helpful to determine the product ID for a given SKU. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: How to Make Your Store More Mobile-Friendly

In April 2015, Google released an algorithm update that favored mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile oriented search results. This algorithm was named “Mobilegeddon”, and it gave leverage to those sites that display perfectly on smartphones and other mobile devices. 

Clearly, having a mobile-friendly website not only makes it easier to engage and convert mobile using customers, but also paves the way for better ranking and visibility on search engines.

While it is good practice to get a WooCommerce mobile app for your store, it is also important to optimize your website and make it more mobile-friendly.

We will first discover the benefits of making your website more mobile-friendly, and then learn the tips and tricks to optimize it for small devices.

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WooCommerce: Redirect Specific Product Search To Custom URL

Go to a WooCommerce website. Search for a product. Get to the search results page, which displays from 0 to N products based on the search term, sorted by relevancy. Easy.

Now, let’s imagine you have a custom landing page for “Tables”, and you want people searching for “tables” to go to that page instead of the default search result page. Quite easy as well – thanks to a neat PHP snippet we will feature today.

Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Alter Product Search @ Manual Admin Orders

Ok, we’re in a niche of a niche this time – manual orders (orders created by the WooCommerce administrator). If you’re familiar with that, the admin would click on “Add order“, fill out the billing & shipping information, and then move to the order items section, where they can add products to the order.

As soon as they click on “Add items” > “Add products“, a table displays with a product search and quantity input. That’s exactly where we’re working today: what if you have 10,000 products in your store, but only create manual invoices with the same 2-3 products? In this case scenario, it makes no sense to search for the whole 10,000 product list and wait for WooCommerce to return a result (slowly) – it’s much more efficient to reduce that list to a specific category or a list of IDs so that the search operations can be faster.

Here’s how it’s done. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Search By Custom Field (Frontend)

The default WooCommerce frontend product search returns results based on whether the search term is present in the product title, short and long description. Also, you can optionally search products by SKU.

But what if you also want to search for a custom field value e.g. you have a custom field called “_brand” and you want to get the products where “_brand” is equal to “apple“?

Now, I’m not sure I’ve explained this in plain English, so let’s take a look at a practical example. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Disable Single Search Result Redirect

You have a WooCommerce product called “VREIUTERTKXYU“. You search for “VREIUTERTKXYU” (exact match). WooCommerce, by default, redirects you to the single product page as there is only 1 possible search result (as opposed to sending you to the search result page).

In today’s tutorial, we will be deactivating this WooCommerce function and go back to the normal (at least, to me) behavior: even if there is an exact match in a search (single search result), we still want to display the search page.

The screenshot that follows gives you a working proof, once the snippet you find below is active. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce Product Search Plugins to Enhance Customer Experience

Say you’re at a clothing store. You know exactly what you want to buy but have to go through the store’s entire catalog to find the product. Sounds like a pointless hassle, right?

Now imagine you had a salesperson to assist you. They’d ask you a few questions – What are you looking for? What’s your budget? What size and color do you want? – and voila, you’ll get just what you wanted. 

This is exactly what a product search feature on your store can do for your customers. 

Product search allows customers to find items they’re looking for faster, improving their experience at your store and increasing the chances of a sale. 

Now, if you have a small WooCommerce store with a handful of products, navigating your website and finding products will be fairly easy. 

But if you offer a wide variety of products spread across categories, product search becomes an essential feature. 

Given its importance, WooCommerce comes with a default search form, which is great for getting started with this feature on your store. However, this form offers only basic features, letting customers search for products mainly by their names. 

For more advanced features – like live search, autocorrection, and providing more relevant results – Woo Product Search plugins can prove to be helpful. 

We’ve done the legwork and compiled a list of some of the best WooCommerce Product Search plugins that can enhance your customers’ shopping experience. Let’s explore them!

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WooCommerce: How to Improve Product Search

Personalized search and product navigation have a dramatic impact on ecommerce sales conversions, and for that reason alone, you should include them in your WooCommerce website build.

But how do you improve the standard search function model included with WooCommerce?

Well, reducing search times and quickly matching your customers to products are two great examples of how you can enhance the customer experience and the value of your brand.

Upgrading the WooCommerce product search function with an AI powered search engine is an easy way to dramatically improve your sales conversion rate; a quick win/win.

This article will explain how to upgrade the basic WooCommerce search and provide a genuinely interactive search experience for your website shoppers. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Advanced Order Search

When it comes to saving time, the out-of-the-box WooCommerce plugin doesn’t give you many options and features. For example, searching through your WooCommerce orders is not straight forward enough because the search options are fairly limited.

By default, you can go to the WooCommerce Orders admin page (wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=shop_order) and use the basic search bar.

You can look for a customer name, a customer billing email and a few more, but that’s pretty much all you can do. You can’t look for multiple fields, you can sort, you can’t filter by order total, and so on.

You get the picture – for a store manager this Orders dashboard is not handy at all. Each extra minute wasted in trying to find something could be better invested – in marketing spend for example.

That’s why we want to show you a quick alternative in order to do advanced searches in seconds. You won’t need any PHP snippets – just a quick plugin that turns your order list into an intuitive and easy-to-use spreadsheet so that you can do all the filtering and manipulation you desire.

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WooCommerce: How to Show Product Search Suggestions?

“Ajax Search” (displaying product search suggestions while a WooCommerce user is typing something in the search bar), is a brilliant idea for all of you ecommerce entrepreneurs.

Saving time to a potential customer is your number one goal. Besides, if your website has a lot of traffic, search should be one of your sales propositions (look at Amazon and eBay to see how prominent the search bar is).

Enabling “Ajax Search” in WooCommerce is actually pretty easy. This time, there is no snippet, but a good combination of free and premium plugins that do the job.

Please note – in this article we will be covering the “Ajax Search” plugins and not the product filtering ones, which are fairly different in regard to the functionality they provide.

So, what are the most reliable “Search Suggestion” plugins for WooCommerce?

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WooCommerce: Add a Product Search Bar in the Header/Footer

Hola amigos, today’s snippet actually comes from my own website. You might have noticed there is a little “magnifying glass” in the navigation menu which scrolls down to a search bar.

Mine, specifically, searches exclusively for blog posts (I excluded pages, products, etc.), but you can customize this and make it search for products only for example. Here’s how I did it – hopefully you can learn something new today!

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