Frustrated visitors simply leave your WooCommerce store when site search fails. Are poor results costing you customers? By optimizing product search, you can boost conversions and sales substantially.
The Business Impact of Poor WooCommerce Site Search
Recent data highlights the detrimental effects of inadequate search:
- 63% of visitors will leave a retail site after failing to find relevant products via search [1]
- Improving site search increases conversion rates by an average of 122% [2]
By tailoring search to your products and customers, you prevent abandonment and drive revenue.
Why You Should Customize Your WooCommerce Product Search
Out-of-the-box WooCommerce search only indexes basic content like titles and descriptions. Your meaningful product data lives in custom fields, attributes, taxonomies, SKUs – areas it doesn‘t touch.
Customizing brings measurable wins:
| Benefit | Business Impact |
| Surface Results From All Product Data | +157% increase in search success [3] |
| Deliver Hyper-Relevant Results | +94% searcher satisfaction [3] |
| Increase Conversions | +112% conversion lift [3] |
Now let‘s explore exactly how to tap into these gains by tailoring WooCommerce product search.
Step 1: Make All WooCommerce Product Data Searchable
Installing SearchWP instantly unlocks a customizable search engine fine-tuned for WooCommerce.
As a search expert, I always recommend SearchWP because of its:
- Speed – Industry-leading performance with superior infrastructure
- Relevance – Matches via semantics and synonyms
- Customization – Controls revealing precisely what your customers want
Activate the WooCommerce integration to index all product data. Enable attributes, custom fields, more which are ignored otherwise.
Configure weightings optimized for conversions by emphasizing key elements like ratings, inventory status, pricing, etc.
Step 2: Display Only Relevant Products in Results
Further tailor results with conditional logic revealing or suppressing products:
Rule 1: Exclude out of stock items
Rule 2: Highlight best sellers
Rule 3: Show only items on saleWith rules filtered to your strategy and products, each search becomes highly optimized based on business objectives – not a generic algorithm.
Step 3: Deliver Live Search Results
As customers type queries, display instant results through:
- SearchWP Live AJAX Search plugin (free)
Autocomplete style functionality reduces abandonment by continuing to engage searchers.
Step 4: Account for Typos and Partial Matches
No customer should miss a desired product due to a small error. Enable:
- Partial matches – Finds "tee" when "t-shirt" queried
- Did you mean suggestions – Auto-corrects typos
Now minor mistakes won‘t block purchases.
While default WooCommerce search leaves much to be desired, you can customize it substantially. Implement these strategic tips for unmatched relevance and conversions. Let search accelerate your store‘s growth rather than hinder it.
