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WordPress Development: A Custom Approach to On-site Search Functionality

WordPress web development is gaining huge appreciation among retailers due to its cost-effectiveness and unique advantages over other CMSs.

One of its favorable features is its capability to turn your simple blog or other website into a fully-fledged online selling store with an easy integration of WooCommerce plugin. Till date, it powers approximately 28% of all web stores.

This writing is all about emphasizing on a great user experience on your WooCommerce store via an impelling and customized on-site search functionality.

Before we plunge more into this, let’s first have an overview of on-site search functionality i.e. what is it and how does it impact our online business?

What is On-site Search Functionality?

An on-site search refers to the process where a visitor lands on your website and undergoes the product search journey on it. In other words, it is the ability of your website that helps your visitors to search and view the products that they are looking for.

And, the major concern of this process is that if your visitors fail to use it easily or effectively, they tend to leave your website forever.

You may have done the best SEO for your website or may have the world-class product to sell or services to offer. Still, once buyers land on your website they might look for more specific products on it.

Here, if you fail to provide them with an easy to use and intuitive on-site search, you are definitely disappointing them and losing on conversions.

Therefore, it is always crucial for you to place this feature on your landing page as well as throughout your website to enhance user-experience enormously. Its added features like filtering options, content relevance and accuracy can help users to find the products they want more easily.

WordPress Web development and Custom Search ability

In context with WordPress, you can easily set up an online site within one day or two. It is no rocket science. Furthermore, you can look out for any prominent WordPress development agency to scale it with WooCommerce integration to enjoy seamless eCommerce activities.

Talking about on-site search functionality, you are being supported by a primary on-site search that serves your website visitors with every kind of services, rules, and other data. However, there is a great need to go beyond plain search and perform customization accordingly.

And, some of the best practices for making on-site search more interactive and compelling are as follows:

  • Auto-completion

Using autocomplete for site search helps your users to reduce the manual efforts like entering the complete name or writing the correct spelling etc.

With auto-completion implemented in your on-site search, products are being suggested as users start typing in the search window. It helps the users to select easily from the drop-down list of suggestions while saving time.

  • Ability to narrow-down

Narrowing-down users’ on-site search by offering them to search for a specific department or product category is helpful in many cases. It doesn’t only bring the relevant products to users but also helps them to save search time.

This way you can easily offer a great customer-experience along with increased conversion rates and customers’ loyalty.

  • Search sorting option

There may be cases when users’ search is linked to several results. In such a scenario, you can offer them search sorting options where they can filter the results as per their preferences.

For e.g., if you deal in an online apparel store, you can offer a sidebar where you can provide users with an option to sort products depending upon price, color, brand etc. This way your users can change the order of performed search results so that they can see the most relevant results first.

  • Advanced custom search setup

Online space is full of opportunity and competitive challenges that you need to tackle while dealing online. So, there is always a need to make your search more unique and customized based on niche preferences.

Here, you can take an easy assistance from experts who can develop a custom functionality as per your desired needs.

While summarizing, I would like to state that on-site search is a critical aspect of websites (either eCommerce or blog page or any other) so you need to take extra consideration while offering one to your potential users.

Today’s consumers have a lot of options to choose from so they are least likely to compromise with your websites’ limitations. Thus, it is essential to have a thorough review of your online website and customers’ preferences so that you can come up with the best possible and effective solution for them.

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Written by Randip Dhiman