Search Archives - Business Bloomer

Enhancing WooCommerce Search with Custom Product Attributes

A person reaching for a red encyclopedia on a neatly organized bookshelf in a library.

A robust search function is paramount for any successful WooCommerce store. Customers rely on search to quickly locate the products they need, and a poorly performing or limited search experience can lead to frustration and lost sales.

A common challenge faced by WooCommerce store owners is the inability of the default search functionality to include custom product attributes. These attributes, which often contain crucial product information like size, color, material, or specific features, are essential for customers seeking products based on those criteria.

This post explores various methods for enhancing WooCommerce search by incorporating custom product attributes into the search index. We’ll examine different approaches, from simple code snippets suitable for smaller stores to more powerful solutions designed for large, high-traffic websites. We’ll also discuss the potential performance implications of each approach, providing guidance on how to choose the best solution for your specific needs and ensuring a smooth and efficient search experience for your customers.

Finding the right balance between functionality, performance, and ease of implementation is key to creating a WooCommerce store that meets the needs of both your customers and your business.

WooCommerce: Track Site Search for Product Ideas

A man looks through vinyl records in a vintage-style music store, emphasizing retro shopping vibes.

In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, the topic of tracking WooCommerce website search terms sparked an insightful discussion.

One member shared how they used to completely ignore search data in Google Analytics, but after setting up a simple weekly report, they discovered a stream of great product ideas based on what users were actively searching for.

While Google Analytics 4 (GA4) might be the default for many, it turns out it’s not always the best option—especially for WooCommerce.

Instead, developers and store owners shared smarter, more tailored ways to log and use search data directly within WordPress. From Ajax listeners to plugins, the possibilities for capturing valuable customer intent are impressive.

If you’re not yet keeping track of your WooCommerce search terms, this post will give you practical ideas to start today. You might be surprised by what your visitors are telling you—without saying a word.

Improving WooCommerce Search with Custom Product Attributes

Scenic view of round hay bales scattered across a harvested wheat field under a clear blue sky.

In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a member asked for a simple way to include custom product attribute fields into the WooCommerce search index.

The user was looking for a way to enhance the native WordPress search functionality without adding additional plugins or custom solutions. Here’s a breakdown of the discussion and suggestions offered.

WooCommerce: Auto-Hide Products Without a Featured Image

In WooCommerce, having a well-organized product catalog is essential for user experience and conversions. However, some store owners may forget to add featured images to products, leading to empty placeholders that can make the shop look incomplete or unprofessional.

If you want to ensure that only products with a featured image are displayed, you need a way to automatically hide those without one.

Instead of manually checking and updating each product, you can use a simple PHP snippet to exclude products missing a featured image from your shop, category, and search pages. This approach keeps your store looking polished while preventing customers from encountering blank product thumbnails. The best part? It only takes a few lines of code to implement.

Below, I’ll show you how to add this snippet to your theme’s functions.php file or a custom plugin, ensuring that only properly set up products appear in your WooCommerce store.

WooCommerce: Search Orders By 2-Letter Country Code [HPOS]

WooCommerce’s order search function is essential for store admins, but with the introduction of High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS), searching by billing or shipping country code may no longer work as expected.

If you’re used to quickly filtering orders by country, this limitation can be frustrating. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to bring back this functionality using a custom code snippet.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to modify the WooCommerce order search to support two-letter country codes, making it easier to find the orders you need. Let’s dive into the solution!

Optimizing Ajax Filters for Large WooCommerce Stores

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a WooCommerce store owner managing 50,000 products sought advice on the best-performing Ajax filtering solution for their extensive catalog.

Traditional filters such as YITH proved too slow, highlighting the need for a more robust, scalable approach. Various community members shared insights on different solutions, including plugins and custom setups, each with unique strengths suited to high-product-volume stores.

Here’s a breakdown of the options and best practices discussed.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

WooCommerce: Exclude Category from Search Results

We’ve already seen how to only display products from a single category on the Shop page. Today, we’ll do something similar, but we’ll target the search result.

Code is somewhat similar to the example I linked to above, so it will use once again the “pre_get_posts” filter in order to modify the query before products are returned on the screen. Enjoy!

Tag: Search