CatCode Smart Filter for WooCommerce

Description

Most WooCommerce filters ask the database the same expensive question on every click — join the attribute tables, join the meta tables, count. On a catalogue of a few thousand products that question takes seconds, and the shopper leaves before the answer arrives.

This plugin keeps its own flat index of “which product carries which value”, rebuilt in the background and kept current by every product save. Filtering reads that one table, so the query cost stops growing with the number of attributes.

What it does

  • Facets from product attributes, from any product taxonomy (categories, tags, brands) and from a custom field.
  • Checkboxes, radio buttons, a select, a range slider or a toggle — per facet.
  • Price slider in the shop’s display currency, an “in stock / out of stock” facet and a rating facet.
  • Honest counts next to every value: a count tells you what you will get, and the value you already picked keeps showing its siblings instead of collapsing to itself.
  • Values with no products are hidden — or shown greyed out, if you prefer the shopper to see the whole range.
  • Numeric values sort as numbers: 1.5 / 2 / 10 / 12.5, not the alphabetical 1.5 / 10 / 12.5 / 2 every term-sorted filter shows.
  • Applying a filter does not reload the page: the listing and the filter block are swapped in place and the URL goes into the browser history, so Back works and the link can be copied and shared.
  • Mobile drawer with a “Show N products” button, so the count is visible before the tap.
  • Chips for what is currently applied, with a one-click reset.
  • Readable URLs: ?ccf=pa_color:червоний;p:100-2500 — one state has exactly one URL, so nothing turns into a duplicate.
  • Crawl control out of the box: a filtered view is noindex,follow with a canonical back to the clean archive, and the shop keeps its crawl budget.
  • Placement as a widget or through the [catcode_filter] shortcode.
  • Works with the theme’s own product grid — the swapped selector is a setting, ul.products by default.
  • Merging duplicate values: 12 В, 12в and 12 V become one checkbox while the products keep their own terms.
  • As many facets as your catalogue needs — nothing here is capped or time-limited.
  • HPOS (custom order tables) compatible.

Requirements

  • WooCommerce 6.0 or newer
  • WordPress 6.2 or newer
  • PHP 7.4+

Installation

  1. Upload the plugin folder to /wp-content/plugins/catcode-smart-filter/
  2. Activate it in the “Plugins” menu
  3. Go to WooCommerce Smart Filter Facets and import the attributes you want to filter by
  4. Open the “Index” tab and press “Rebuild the index” once
  5. Place the block: the “CatCode: Smart Filter” widget, or the [catcode_filter] shortcode

FAQ

The filter block does not appear

It renders only where a product listing does — the shop, a product category or tag archive, and product search results. Check that a facet is imported and active, and that the index has been built at least once (WooCommerce Smart Filter Index).

Clicking a value reloads the whole page

The AJAX swap needs to know which element holds the product grid. Most themes use ul.products, which is the default; if yours does not, put its selector into “Product grid selector” in the settings.

The counts do not match the listing

Press “Rebuild the index”. A count and a listing can only disagree when the index is behind the catalogue — after a bulk import that wrote to the database directly, for example.

Does it work with a page cache?

Yes. Filtered views carry a query string, so they are served fresh; the clean archive stays cacheable. The counts have their own cache with a lifetime you set.

Will Google index thousands of filter URLs?

No. A filtered view is noindex,follow with a canonical pointing at the clean archive. Every filtered combination stays out of the index.

Reviews

There are no reviews for this plugin.

Contributors & Developers

“CatCode Smart Filter for WooCommerce” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Changelog

1.0.0

  • First release.