How to Speed Up Your Site Search in OpenCart 3.x

Hey and thanks for tuning into our new OpenCart tutorial. Today’s topic is the search bar in your store and how to make it blazing fast and optimize it for tens of thousands of products. The tool for that is called iSearch Corporate and it just got updated with OpenCart 3 support. You will see a link in the video description below. Let’s see how it works! Step one, create a new engine. iSearch Corporate allows you to create multiple engines that can work for different stores in a single installation. Basically - multistore support. So, let’s click Edit Engine and see how things work. Okay, here we have the main extension settings. First, start by enabling the status. Second, you can give your engine a custom name. That’s just for internal use. And third, select the store you want to use the search engine. Below that, you have all the possible fields that iSearch Corporate can use to give results when customers are searching for a product. You can set the extension to search in attributes, filters, options, basically any type of product info. The default setup includes a few popular choices like the category name, model, product name and tags. You can select any field you want your extension to use for displaying search results to your customers. Now, here’s where the magic happens. For iSearch Corporate to work, you need to cache your products. These settings are cache sensitive, so if you modify them, you will need to recreate your Database cache. Let’s save what we have so far and Start the caching. This is required for the extension to run. Step two - Advanced settings. So, the most important things here are the Instant results that will appear the moment a customer starts typing in the search bar… The engine used for the standard results displayed after the customer hits Enter… And the Full-Text indexing of results that is used to optimize the search for large stores. Click the info button to learn more about it. Next is the Default sorting. This is where you select how you want the search results to be sorted after a customer hits enter. You have tons of options here including quantity, price, sales, as well as the matches in product information like product name, category, description and so on. A very useful feature that gives your store a lot of potential sales power. Last, you have a way to add replacements for mistakes in the customer’s search terms. For example, if they make a typo like that, the extension will automatically search for the correct term here. Okay, let’s save our progress and move on. Step three, localisation. This is where you can modify the headings and text in your search box. Enter whatever you find most suitable for your store. When you’re done, click save and move on to the final step. Step four, design. This tab lets you tweak the way your search results look like in your storefront. You can edit properties like the results box width, height, colored highlights of the matching search results, and max results number. Also, you have control over the number of suggestions, displaying images and their sizes, displaying product models or showing their prices in the search results box. Last, you can change the total number of found products and modify the styles of your results box if you have knowledge in CSS. That’s it! Now we can see how the search works in the storefront. Let’s start typing iPhone. The instant results come up right away. We can also try the spell check… there it is, the product comes up instantly. Clicking on View All will reveal the search results page where you can see the default sorting in action. So, that’s it! A lightning fast search for a better customer experience. Even if you have tens of thousands of products, you can make sure they find what they’re looking for right away with iSearch Corporate. Was this video useful? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to find out what you think of the extension and subscribe to our channel for more OpenCart videos. Thanks for watching!
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