Enhancing product search in Magento is critical for improving user experience and boosting sales. With more than 250,000 merchants using Magento globally, optimizing search can have a significant impact.
Research shows that 43% of visitors head straight to the search bar, and 30% of them leave if they can’t find what they’re after. By implementing effective search strategies, merchants can boost up to 50% conversion rates.
This blog post will share valuable tips and tricks to help Magento store owners optimize their product search. This will make it easier for customers to find what they need and ultimately increase revenue.
- About 78% of users indicate that product images are essential when performing a search.
- Product search results displayed within the first 5 seconds are generally more likely to result in a click-through.
- Search filters may improve conversion rates by approximately 40% in Magento stores.
- Utilizing the “Did you mean?” functionality can help guide users back on track if they misspell a product name or keyword, potentially reducing frustration and abandonment.
What Is Magento Product Search?
Magento product search is a crucial feature of any Magento-powered website, allowing users to conduct direct product searches.
This functionality significantly impacts user experience and overall company performance. Magento offers two primary forms of product search:
| Search Type | Description | Key Features |
| Quick Search | Allows customers to quickly locate related products by typing a few characters or phrases that match the product name or other product information. |
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| Advanced Search | Enables customers to perform detailed searches by entering various parameters, such as product name, SKU, description, price, and custom attributes, offering a more flexible and specific search experience. |
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Why is it important to improve Magento product search?
Customers can’t buy your products if they can’t find them. Therefore, it’s essential to make product discovery as easy as possible.
Enhancing product search boosts your click-through rate (CTR), conversions, and overall revenue.
A 2023 Nosto study revealed that a staggering 80% of shoppers would leave a website due to poor search functionality, underscoring the importance of optimizing your Magento product search.
However, before you start refining your product search, you need to take a few crucial steps.
What To Do Before Optimizing Magento Product Search
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Explore Effective Website Search Strategies
- Analyze your competitors’ website search strategies, homepage layouts, user experience (UX) approaches, and critical search features.
- Conduct a Google search and perform keyword research to identify the terms users in your industry are searching for and understand their primary priorities.
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Analyzing Metrics: eCommerce And Website Search Performance
- Monitor essential e-commerce metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), conversions, and bounce rate and compare them with industry standards.
- Assess website search metrics, including total unique searches, search exits, and refinements, comparing these against industry benchmarks.
- Utilize tools like Google Analytics to monitor these metrics.
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Ask For Feedback
- Gather feedback on Magento product search through popup multiple-choice surveys, open-ended page-specific surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, or online polls.
- Utilize customer input to identify effective improvements and prevent unnecessary changes.
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Plan For Maintenance And Updates
- Plan regular maintenance and updates to keep search functionality accurate and relevant.
- Schedule routine indexing and reindexing of products to ensure up-to-date search results.
- Continuously monitor search performance and adjust settings as necessary to maintain peak performance.
Top Tips To Improve Magento Search for Your Products
1. Enhance The Overall User Experience
Optimizing the search functionality based on your specific industry, customer base, and business goals is crucial for enhancing the overall user experience for Magento product search.
This means carefully choosing product features and keywords, organizing product categories, highlighting images, and showing customer reviews and photos.
For Example e-commerce site, Optimizing the search functionality for an online clothing store is crucial for enhancing the overall user experience for Magento product search.
This means carefully choosing product features and keywords (like “summer dress” or “casual shoes”), organizing product categories (such as “Men’s Clothing” and “Women’s Accessories”), highlighting images, and showing customer reviews and photos.
2. Customize Search Results
In Magento, you can use historical user data to enhance search recommendations and improve personalized search results, boosting user experience.
This involves enabling search recommendations in the Magento admin panel. This allows you to analyze historical user data to provide customers with relevant product suggestions based on past searches.
For Example, if a customer frequently searches for “summer dresses,” the system can suggest similar products, such as “summer tops” or “summer skirts,” to enhance their shopping experience.
This method customizes search results to help customers find what they want, improving their experience and increasing sales.
3. Prioritize Mobile
To optimize Magento search for mobile, ensure correct display of results and effortless functionality on smaller screens. Simplify layout, refine design, and prioritize mobile-first indexing. Utilize Elasticsearch 7, configure search settings, and optimize performance for a great user experience.
If a mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to load, 53% of visits are abandoned.
4. Accelerate Magento Search
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MySQL Search
If your Magento site uses MySQL, you can improve search speed by optimizing the MySQL database performance. This includes:
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Optimizing Database Performance:
Ensure that the MySQL database is configured correctly and optimized for performance. This includes adjusting settings such as query caching, buffer sizes, and connection limits to maximize database performance.
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Indexing and Caching:
Implement indexing and caching mechanisms to improve search speed. Indexing allows the database to quickly locate specific data, while caching stores frequently accessed data in memory, reducing the need for database queries.
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Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is used as a search engine in Magento. Since the release of Magento 2.4, all versions of Magento have Elasticsearch, an enterprise-grade search engine, as the default option.
We compared Elasticsearch with other Magento product search alternatives — such as MySQL, the original default Magento search engine — and found that it’s faster, more accurate, and more flexible.
If your Magento site uses Elasticsearch, you can improve search speed by ensuring proper configuration and utilizing built-in features
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Proper Configuration:
Ensure that Elasticsearch is properly configured for your Magento site. This includes setting up the correct indices, mappings, and query settings to optimize search performance.
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Built-in Caching and Indexing:
Use Elasticsearch’s built-in caching and indexing features to improve search speed. Caching saves data that is often used in memory, so the system doesn’t have to keep asking the database for it. Indexing helps the database find specific data faster.
Here are the steps:
- Install Elasticsearch 7 via the Magento admin panel: Navigate through Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Elasticsearch 7.
- Configure search settings via the Admin Panel: Navigate through Stores > Configuration > Elastic Search > Catalog.
- Select desired search criteria settings, such as Fuzzy Search and Wildcard Search.
- Add Synonyms, like “couch” and “sofa.”
- Choose Magento product search filters, such as Model, Color, and Price.
- Decide on match types (And or Or) for search terms.
- Seek expert help or tutorials for advanced configurations.
5. Optimize Performance and Speed
To optimize Magento product search performance and speed, ensure your store runs on the latest version, which fixes bugs and enhances overall performance.
Additionally, improve loading times by enabling caching mechanisms like Full Page Cache (FPC) and Redis cache.
These steps can significantly boost the speed and responsiveness of your product search, enhancing user experience and increasing conversions.
AccuWeb Hosting optimizes Magento site speed with a pre-configured caching plugin, reducing server load by caching static content for faster performance.
6. Optimize Your Product Categories
Optimize your product categories to improve Magento product search and organize them in a logical and easy-to-navigate manner. This helps customers quickly find what they want, enhancing the overall user experience.
Ensure that categories are well-structured, with clear and descriptive names, and that subcategories are nested in a hierarchical manner.
A study by Baymard Institute found that 22% of customers abandon their shopping carts due to difficulty finding products, highlighting the importance of a well-organized category structure.
7. Focus on the visuals
Improving Magento product search relies heavily on technical website elements. However, in ecommerce, the front end—what users see—is just as crucial.
Design your search function to match your website: keep it clean, easy to use, and visually attractive. Put the search bar where it’s easy to find, use colors and text that fit your brand, and make sure the “search” button stands out with bold text or a bright color.
Extensions For Improving Magento Product Search
| Extension |  |
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| Best For | Large-scale e-commerce sites | Complex search requirements | High-performance search | Magento-based e-commerce sites | Large-scale search requirements |
| Free Trial | 30 days | NO | Yes | 30-day Free Trial | No |
| Pricing | 35 €/month | 49$ /month | $95 /month | €178 / month | 149$ |
| Compatibility | Magento 2 | Magento 2 | Magento 2 | Magento 2 | Magento 2 |
| Key Features |
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Conclusion:
Improving your Magento product search is an easy way to improve your website, increase sales, and reduce visitors leaving quickly.
Before you begin, research, figure out key metrics, and gather feedback to know what to focus on.
As you optimize your Magento search, refer to your research findings for guidance.
If you run a Magento website and aren’t using AccuWeb Hosting, contact our expert team. Our hosting services are optimized for Magento to help you build a better e-commerce site and boost your revenue.
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