How to add AJAX search for WooCommerce stores

As a WooCommerce store owner, you’ll want to find the best way to enhance users’ search experience, right? So adding AJAX search for WooCommerce is a great method for your store.

In this tutorial, we’ll let you see how AJAX search benefits your store. You certainly will wonder how you can add AJAX search for WooCommerce stores. Do not be impatient! You’ll find all these types of information in our article.

Before getting started, please see what the AJAX search looks like.

Now let’s dive into it!

What is AJAX product search?

When a small change is requested on the page, there is no need to reload the entire page because it causes the site to reload lots of unnecessary things. That’s the reason why AJAX comes into existence.

Ajax stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Written in JavaScript, AJAX will let users see live search results as they are typing characters into the search box.

For WooCommerce sites, AJAX product search plays an important role in improving the shopping experience. It helps customers save time and find products quickly.

Apart from enhancing customer experience, AJAX search brings many other benefits to your WooCommerce sites. Please keep reading to get them in detail.

Benefits of using AJAX search for WooCommerce

You’ll gain lots of advantages when AJAX search is applied to your website. In particular, it will:

Enhance users’ search experience

In shopping online, every second is precious. Therefore, the smarter your search engine is, the more appealing your store becomes in the eyes of visitors. And AJAX search is a great way to optimize the search process.

Using the AJAX feature, visitors will see live suggestions for product searches, even including the related item that they don’t intend to seek from the beginning. The instant search results will show product information like images and prices. Just click on the option, and visitors immediately go to visit the product instead of waiting for the search page to reload before displaying results.

Such an exciting feature definitely will make visitors feel satisfied. As the search process occurs smoothly, it may encourage visitors to purchase quickly and repeat purchases, contributing to increasing your revenue.

Improve SEO for websites

Because AJAX works to let users interact with the website without reloading the page, it only retrieves the required content rather than the whole content of the page. For this reason, using AJAX will help cut down bandwidth usage, thus improving your web performance.

Google always wants to focus on user experience; therefore, websites with optimized page speed will be favored by Google. When you include AJAX functionality in your website, you indirectly improve SEO for your website.

With the benefits AJAX search carries, it becomes an essential thing for WooCommerce stores. So how can you have AJAX search for your store? Please keep reading. We’ll show you the solution right now.

Woostify Ajax Search: The best WooCommerce AJAX search plugin

By default, WooCommerce doesn’t offer AJAX functionality; therefore, you’ll need a supporting tool to create this feature. In this article, we introduce you to Woostify Ajax Search, which may fulfill the expectation of a powerful AJAX product search plugin. Let’s see why it deserves to be named here and how it works.

With a user-friendly AJAX-powered search form, Woostify Ajax Search will bring visitors great search experiences. Once Woostify AJAX Search works, it provides visitors with a live search bar where they can search by any product data and get the results at an incredible speed.

Woostify Ajax Search comes with the following features:

• Search by categories, tags, attributes, titles, SKUs, and descriptions.
• Search in custom fields like prices, ratings, dates, and so on
• Keyword autocomplete included
• Custom color for search results
• Variable products support
• Product images and prices shown in live search results
• Removal of out-of-stock products

We’ll explain each feature in detail while instructing how to use Woostify Ajax Search in the next part. Let’s get started!

Add WooCommerce AJAX product search with Woostify Ajax Search

It takes a few minutes to set up Woostify Ajax Search. Follow the steps below to have the add-on work for your WooCommerce store.

Step 1: Enable Ajax Product Search in Woostify

After setting up Woostify Pro, your dashboard will have the Woostify option on the left menu.

From the dashboard, you go to Woostify and visit the Add-ons tab to find the Ajax Product Search add-on.

To activate it, tap the button in the lower right corner of the add-on.

Then, click the setting icon to start setting up Ajax search for WooCommerce with the add-on.

Step 2: Set up Ajax Product Search

Here are all the parts you need to cover for the add-on setup. Now we’ll come to explore the functionality of each part and how it works for your store.

1. Filter the search results by category

First, come to the Filter part.

When you tick the Display category filter box, a category filter will appear on your search bar as in the image below:

When visitors select a specific category and enter a letter in the Search Products box, the search bar will only suggest the products belonging to this category. This filter will let visitors see a full list of categories and narrow their search to find their desired items more quickly.

2. Search by Category, Tag, and Attributes

These options allow displaying categories, tags, and attributes, together with products, in the search results.

Let’s see how the results display once Show search in category, Show search in tag, and Show search in attributes are selected.

As you can see, when visitors type the letters in the search box, categories and tags will be prioritized for display. They are placed above the results for products.

Similarly, we’ll see the “blue” attribute appear above products in the search suggestions.

Attribute image

3. Search in custom fields

Apart from categories, tags, and attributes, Ajax Product Search allows you to set search in additional fields such as prices, sale prices, preorders, and ratings.

For example, we select _regular_price as a custom field. When visitors type a number, you will receive the suggested results as in the image below:

4. Search by title, SKU, description, and short description

If you want to let visitors find specific products using detailed information, these options can help a lot. When they know the product’s name or SKU, they can Search by Product title or SKU. In some cases, visitors only remember some product characteristics, then still easily find the products they are looking for by typing Product Description or Product Short Description in the search box.

5. Other options for product search

The add-on also provides you with some other options like:

• Out stock product: allow removing out-of-stock products in search results.
• Limit results: enter -1 to show all the products
• Highlight color: set the color for displayed suggestions

6. Index product data for Ajax search

After completing all the fields for Ajax Product Search, you need to index data to update the setup for all the products in your store.

You can read more at Ajax Search docs to get more details about the add-on.

Set up AJAX search for WooCommerce today

With a powerful WooCommerce Ajax product search plugin, you can provide customers with a better shopping experience and improve SEO for websites. With these great advantages, Ajax search also helps increase revenue. Lots of benefits, right?

Woostify Ajax Product Search is an ideal choice for your store if you desire to have an Ajax-powered tool. Just upgrade to Woostify Pro, and you get a chance to use this functionality together with many other exciting Woostify features such as Smart Product Filter, Header Footer Builder, and WooBuilder.