Shop Search for WooCommerce

The built-in WordPress search finds a title when it is typed exactly as
written. It does not find the SKU, the category, or the word with a typo.
Shop Search for WooCommerce turns it into a shop search that understands what your
customers mean – and shows you what they did not find.

Everything runs in your own WordPress database. The plugin contacts no
external service.

At a glance

• Live suggestions with image, price and stock status – from two characters on
• Finds SKUs, categories and tags, ranked by relevance
• “Did you mean …?” checked against the real number of results
• Results page with tabs per section, sorting and an empty state that helps
• Search log with the searches that found nothing – your shopping list of
  missing products and words
• Blocks, Elementor widgets, shortcodes and filter hooks
• No cloud, no tracking, no external requests

Need synonyms, automatic typo correction, filters or rules per search term?
They are part of the separate plugin
F12 Shop Search Pro
– see “Free and Pro” below.

As you type

• Suggestion list from two characters on: word completions and the
  matching products with image, price, “Sale” and “Out of stock”, plus the
  SKU when it was what matched.
• Popular products on the first click into an empty search field
  (optional).
• Width, corner radius and colors of the list are adjustable, with a live
  preview.
• Cached and rate-limited, so a script hammering the endpoint does not slow
  down your shop.

What is found

• SKUs, including those of variations – the product is found.
• Categories and tags as search text; matching categories as cards above
  the results.
• Relevance: a full title match ranks before an SKU, before a category,
  before body text.
• “Did you mean …?” for typos, checked against the actual number of
  results – no guessing.

On the results page

• Tabs per section (All · Products · Posts · Pages …) with result counts;
  “All” as a grouped overview. Sections combine any content types.
• Sorting, unit price, pack sizes and badges on the product card.
• Empty state with tips and categories instead of a dead end.
• The plugin’s own results page, your theme’s, or a page you design
  yourself, with any theme – tested with Twenty Twenty-Five and Twenty
  Twenty-One.

Insights

• Search log in your own database: frequent searches and searches without
  results for the last 7, 30 or 90 days – the list that tells you which
  products or words your shop is missing.

Fits in

• Blocks for the block editor, Elementor widgets and shortcodes.
• Every setting is also available as a filter hook – for developers. A
  filter always wins over the setting; the hook name is shown next to each
  field.

Free and Pro

This plugin is complete on its own. For shops with a large range, many
spellings of the same product, or a team that tunes the search every week,
F12 Shop Search Pro
is a separate plugin from Forge12 that adds:

• Synonyms with a visual editor – connect terms, categories and products
  with a line, so “wholemeal” finds the “whole grain flour”. Simulate the
  search first; get suggestions from real searches.
• Typos corrected automatically – “Dinkl” shows the results for “Dinkel”
  right away, with a way back to the typed word.
• Word forms and compound words – “pans” finds “pan”,
  “wholegrainflour” finds “whole-grain flour”; only words from your own range,
  nothing guessed.
• Filters on the results page – category, price (steps or slider),
  availability and any WooCommerce attribute, with the number of results at
  every value; without reloading the page, as a panel on phones.
• Rules per search term – pin a product to the top, hide results, or send
  a search straight to a page.
• Custom fields (also ACF) searched along.
• Click rate per term and “searched but rarely clicked”, with a button
  that creates the rule right there.
• Search templates – carry the look of field, suggestion list, results
  page and filters over to the next site.
• Avada Post Cards, icon sets and the search field in the header;
  WPML and Polylang.
• Fast path for suggestions, delivered without loading plugins and theme.

See the comparison and Pro on forge12.com

Source code and third-party software

The settings screen is a React application. Its readable source code is in the
src/ folder of the plugin; build/index.js is generated from it. To rebuild:
npm install && npm run build (Node.js 18 or later; the help chapters in
hilfe/ are turned into src/hilfe/inhalt.generated.js by
tools/hilfe-bauen.mjs).

Bundled with the plugin:

• Inter variable font (build/fonts/) – SIL Open Font License 1.1,
  https://openfontlicense.org
• lucide-react icons – ISC license
• react-router – MIT license
• WordPress packages (@wordpress/components, element, i18n, api-fetch) –
  GPL-2.0-or-later

The plugin’s own code is licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later.