FiboSearch Pro AJAX Search for WooCommerce

Whoever uses your search box is worth three times whoever browses

It is the figure that organises everything else and the one hardly any shop looks at.

Somebody who arrives and starts looking at categories is browsing. Somebody who types into the search box already knows what they want and is trying to find it in order to buy it. Their intent is completely different, and in most shops that visitor converts several times better than average.

And that is exactly the visitor almost every shop gives the worst experience to, because WordPress's search is literal: it does not understand plurals, does not forgive an accent, does not find things if you type the brand before the model, and if there is no exact match it returns an empty page.

FiboSearch Pro replaces that with instant search suggesting results as you type.

What it brings

• Instant search with suggestions while typing, which is what virtually every large shop offers.
• High speed even on enormous catalogues, with response times of fractions of a second on catalogues over fifty thousand products.
• Built for WooCommerce, with the product card in the results.

The search results are a product in themselves

What appears in that dropdown decides the sale, and there are four decisions worth more than the plugin.

Put the image and the price in each suggestion. A list of names forces a click to find out whether it is what you want. With a photograph and a price, the visitor chooses at a glance.

Show whether there is stock. Marking sold-out items in the dropdown itself avoids the worst possible journey, which is clicking, getting excited and discovering there is none.

Never return an empty page. If there is no match, show the best sellers from the nearest category or the popular products. A "no results found" is a guaranteed exit.

Order by what you sell, not by literal relevance. If somebody searches a generic term, the first result should be your best seller in that family, not whichever happens to carry it in the title.

What genuinely comes out of this: the search log

It is the part nobody looks at and the most profitable of all.

What people type into your search box is a list, in their own words, of what they expected to find in your shop. And there are three golden things in it.

Searches with no results are products you should stock, or products you do have under another name. Both get fixed and both are lost sales today.

Searches repeated often tell you what should be in the main menu, because if people have to search for it they are not finding it by browsing.

And the vocabulary they use is hardly ever yours. If your catalogue says "safety footwear" and everybody types "work boots", there is the text to add to your product pages.

Requirements

It needs WordPress and WooCommerce. On large catalogues it is worth reviewing how the index gets built, because that is where the speed comes from.

Alternatives in the catalogue

The direct alternative is Advanced Woo Search, the catalogue's most used, covering the same ground. Between the two, the choice gets made by testing which returns better results with your specific catalogue, because that is all that matters.

If your problem is not the shop but the whole site (documentation, custom fields, PDF content, custom post types), then you need to replace WordPress's search engine and not only WooCommerce's: SearchWP is built for that, and Ivory Search is another option.

If what is missing is not searching but narrowing a large catalogue by several criteria at once, that is filtering and it is another piece: YITH Ajax Product Filter and BeRocket.

And to see what people do on your site, including what they search for, MonsterInsights brings the reports into the admin.

Frequently asked questions

Why is it better than WordPress search?
Because the standard one is literal: it fails on plurals, accents and word order, and returns empty pages.

Does it handle a large catalogue?
Yes, it is designed to respond fast even with tens of thousands of products.

What should appear in the suggestions?
Image, price and availability. A list of names forces a click to find out whether it fits.

What do I do when there are no results?
Never leave the page empty. Show the best sellers from the nearest category.

What is the search log for?
Knowing which products you lack, what should be in the menu and what words people use for you.

Is it for searching outside the shop?
It is focused on WooCommerce. For the whole site there are plugins that replace the search engine.