CatCode Smart Search for WooCommerce

Description

The standard WooCommerce search looks for the exact letters you typed. “Notebok”, “ноутбак”, “AB 123-45” instead of “AB12345” — and the shopper sees “No products were found” while the product is right there. Smart Search fixes that without sending your catalogue to an outside service: it keeps its own compact index in your WordPress database and answers from it.

What shoppers get

  • Typos are forgiven. One typo in words of 4–6 letters, two in longer words; swapped letters count as one typo. “Showing results for …” tells the shopper what was searched.
  • SKUs the way people type them. “AB-123 45”, “ab12345” and “AB 12345” all find AB12345; Cyrillic letters that look like Latin ones (А, В, С, Е, Н, К, М, О, Р, Т, Х) are read as Latin. The exact SKU comes first.
  • Ukrainian and Russian spellings together. “телевізор” finds “Телевизор”, “мило” finds “Мыло”: і/и/ы, є/е/э, ї, ґ and the apostrophe are matched automatically.
  • Word forms. “чохли” finds “чохла”, “headphones” finds “headphone”.
  • Live suggestions under the search field: product image, price, SKU, the categories the results are in, “All results (N)”. Keyboard navigation, works on mobile, no jQuery.
  • Ranked results page. Name and SKU matches first, then categories and brands; products in stock before sold-out ones. The shopper can still sort by price or popularity.

What the shop owner gets

  • An index that updates itself when a product, its stock or its category changes; big imports are indexed in the background.
  • The first build runs in the background after activation; the shop keeps its standard search until the index is ready.
  • A search tester in the admin: type like a shopper, see the results and the time it took.
  • WP-CLI: wp catcode-srch reindex, wp catcode-srch search "query", wp catcode-srch stats.
  • A ready-made form: [catcode_srch_search].

Fast on big catalogues

A search reads the vocabulary, the entries of the few words it picked and the rows of the winners — never the products table with LIKE. The index lives in five small tables with the keys the queries need.

Where the data goes

Nowhere. The index is built from your products and stays in your database; suggestions are served by your own site through the WordPress REST API (/wp-json/catcode-srch/v1/suggest). No external requests, no tracking.

Installation

  1. Install and activate the plugin. WooCommerce must be active.
  2. The index builds in the background (a few minutes for tens of thousands of products). Progress: WooCommerce Smart Search Index and test.
  3. Suggestions appear under the existing search fields of the theme. To place a form yourself, use the [catcode_srch_search] shortcode.

FAQ

Does it work with my theme’s search field?

Suggestions attach to every field named “s” — the WordPress, WooCommerce and most theme search forms. If your theme uses another field, set its CSS selector in the settings.

What if the index is not built yet or finds nothing?

The standard WordPress search runs, exactly as without the plugin.

Will it slow down my site?

Pages load one small script and stylesheet; the server is asked only when a shopper types. Indexing happens when products are saved, not when pages are viewed.

Does it search in descriptions?

Name, SKU, categories (with parent categories) and brands are searched. These are the fields shoppers search by; descriptions bring many accidental matches.

Is my data sent anywhere?

No. Everything happens on your server.

Reviews

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Contributors & Developers

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

Contributors

Changelog

1.0.0

  • First release: own index, typo tolerance, SKUs with spaces and dashes, Ukrainian/Russian spelling matching, word forms, live suggestions, ranked results page, admin search tester, WP-CLI commands.