Smart Search for WooCommerce — product search with typos, SKUs and live suggestions

Smart Search for WooCommerce is a plugin that makes your store search work the way shoppers actually use it. They make typos (“ноутбак” instead of “ноутбук”), mix Ukrainian and Russian (“телевизор samsung”), type a SKU the way it is printed on the box — with spaces and dashes (“LG 6769/2-2”) — or type in the wrong keyboard layout altogether. The standard WordPress search looks for the exact piece of text, so all of these end with “No products were found”, and the shopper leaves for a competitor.

Smart Search builds its own index in your site’s database — no external service, no monthly fee — and finds products by name, SKU, categories and brands, allowing for typos, word endings and different spellings. Under your theme’s search field live suggestions appear with image and price, and the results page shows the best matches first. Theme templates are not changed. There is also an OpenCart version with the same search rules.

What the shopper sees

• Suggestions while typing. After two characters, products with image, price and the matched word highlighted appear under the search field, categories with match counts above them, and “All results (N)” at the bottom.
• Correction without questions. If the query has a typo, the shopper sees “Showing results for ноутбук” — and results, not an empty page.
• Keyboard. Arrows move through the suggestions, Enter on a highlighted item opens the product, Enter with nothing highlighted opens the results page, Escape closes the list without clearing the text.
• Any theme. Suggestions work with the header search field, the widget, the Product Search block and the [catcode_srch_search] shortcode.

The results page is your theme’s regular WooCommerce search page: the same design, sorting by price or popularity, pagination. Only the order and the completeness change: name and SKU matches first, then category and brand matches, and out-of-stock products at the end.

What the store owner gets

WooCommerce → Smart Search: the “Settings” and “Index and test” tabs, plus “What shoppers search for” in Pro.

• Settings. Rank the results page, out-of-stock products last, typo strictness, how many products the suggestions show and after how many characters they start, what to show (image, price, SKU, categories), the CSS selector of the search fields. A separate switch turns any site search into a product search — for themes whose field searches the whole site.
• Where to search. Always — name and SKU. With switches — categories (with parent categories) and brands; in Pro — tags, attributes, short and full description, variation SKUs, GTIN and your own meta fields. Change the set and the index rebuilds in the background while search keeps working.
• Index and test. How many products, words and SKUs are in the index, how many changes are queued, when the last build ran and how many seconds it took, and a “Rebuild the index” button.
• Tester. Type like a shopper — with typos, in another language, a SKU with spaces — and see what they get, in what order and in how many milliseconds.
• WP-CLI. wp smart-search reindex, wp smart-search search "query", wp smart-search stats — for big catalogues and import scripts.

Pro: layout fix, transliteration, synonyms, statistics

• Wrong keyboard layout. “yjen,er” finds “ноутбук”, “тщеуищщл” finds “notebook”. The shopper did not notice the keyboard was set to the other language — the store did.
• Transliteration. “noutbuk” finds “ноутбук”, “самсунг” finds “Samsung”, “дайсон” finds “Dyson”.
• Synonyms. Groups (“ноутбук, лептоп, laptop” — any word finds the others) and one-way rules (“айфон => iphone”).
• More fields. Tags, attributes (colour, size, material), the short description, the first 5,000 characters of the full description, variation SKUs, GTIN/EAN and meta fields such as a manufacturer code from an import — weighted lower than the name.

What shoppers search for. Top searches of the last 30 days and searches that found nothing: products people want to buy from you, or synonyms that are missing. No personal data; searches by store staff are not counted, and neither is re-sorting the results page.

How it works — step by step

1. After activation the plugin builds the index in the background: it splits names, SKUs, categories and brands into words, reduces different spellings to one, stores the word stem and, for each word, trigrams for typo matching. While the index is building, the store uses the standard search.
2. The shopper types in the search field — the plugin’s script asks a REST route on your own site for suggestions, and it answers from the index.
3. Each word of the query is matched exactly, by its beginning and — if not found — with typos; SKUs are compared without spaces, dashes and dots. Pro adds the layout fix, transliteration and synonyms.
4. Products get scores: a match in the name or SKU weighs more than in a category or description, a full match more than a partial one; out-of-stock products go last.
5. On the search page the plugin hands WooCommerce the products it found in order of relevance, and WooCommerce itself handles prices, sorting and pagination.
6. Nothing found or the index is still building — the standard WordPress search runs, and the shopper never sees an error.

Under the hood

• No template changes. The results page works through WooCommerce’s own search query: the plugin supplies the products it found and their order by relevance. Prices, sales, sorting and pagination stay yours.
• Its own index in the wp_catcode_srch_* tables: documents, words, postings, trigrams, SKUs. A search reads the vocabulary and the entries of a few words, never the products table with LIKE.
• Updates without delay. Hooks on saving a product, a variation, stock, categories and brands; bulk changes go to a background queue in steps, and an hourly safety check compares products by modification date.
• Text normalisation is the same as in our Smart Search for OpenCart: a light stemmer, rules for і/и/ы, є/е/э, apostrophes and Cyrillic look-alikes of Latin letters in SKUs.
• For developers. The REST route /wp-json/catcode-srch/v1/suggest, filters for synonyms and word variants, WP-CLI commands.
• Uninstall. Deleting the plugin removes the index tables, settings and background jobs — the store goes back to the standard search.

How to install

1. Download the free version catcode-smart-search-for-woocommerce-free-1.0.0.zip with the button at the top of the page (or the Pro archive from your account after payment) and install it: Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Activate the plugin — the index starts building in the background. Progress is shown in WooCommerce → Smart Search → “Index and test”.
3. In the tester on the same tab, type a query with a typo or a SKU with spaces — you will see what the shopper gets.
4. Open the storefront and start typing in the search field — suggestions appear under it. No search field in your theme — add the [catcode_srch_search] shortcode.
5. For Pro: paste the licence key from the e-mail after payment, or press “Try Pro for 7 days” in the “Pro licence” section of the settings.