How to configure PrestaShop 1.7 search settings. 

The How To PrestaShop video tutorial series continues with a guide to configuring PrestaShop 1.7 search settings. In the video I explain how to set up the main search preferences and how the tag system works and why you should use it. A full transcript of the video is included below.

Video transcript.

Hi everyone, welcome to the PrestaShop 1.7 tutorial video series. Today, we will continue to discover how to configure your shop by going through the last menu, Search settings.

If you want to make sure your customers find your product while they navigate your website, not only should you think carefully about how your shop and its catalog is organized, but you should also make sure your shop’s own internal search engine is working efficiently. This is what this section is about.

This chapter contains two section: Search parameters and Tags

Search parameters.

The first feature is called Aliases list. When customers make a request using your shop’s internal search engine, they may make mistakes in spelling. If PrestaShop does not display the right results, the “alias” feature can address them. You will be able to take words containing spelling errors, and point them to the real products sought by customers.

To create a new useful alias, you should first find the spelling errors most often typed by your users:

1. Go to the “Shop search” tab of the “Stats” page, under the “Stats” menu. You can see the words typed by your customers as well as the most frequent errors.
2. Take the most frequent ones, and add them to your list of aliases, in order to point users to the correct products.
3. Click the “Add new alias” button on the “Search” parameters page.

The creation form is very straightforward: indicate the typo you want corrected, and the correct word it should lead to.

Your aliases can be used as soon as they are saved. We also invite you to consult the sections of this guide on product and category meta tags, to better understand how to display products based on words typed by your customers.

Indexing.

This section provides information on the number of products that can be searched through your shop’s search function, and compares it to the number of products present in your catalog.

If the values do not match, you must click the “Add missing products to the index” link. Only the new products will be indexed.

Search options.

This section enables you to configure the behaviour of your shop’s search function:

• Search within word –  This option improves search by allowing you to make queries that do not only match the start of the search word; for instance, “lou” for “blouse”.
• Search exact end match –  With this option you can give results that will match exactly the end of the search word.
• Minimum word length
• Blacklisted words

Weight.

PrestaShop enables you to prioritise certain data when a search is performed on your shop.

As indicated in the section, the search “weight” of a product represents its importance and relevance for the ranking of the products when customers try a new search. An item with a weight of 8 will have 4 times more value than an item with a weight of 2.

You have many factors that you can assign a weight to: short description, category, tags, attributes, etc. You will find that the display order of results can be reversed because you changed the weight of the various fields. Fine-tuning these settings will be more visible on a large catalog with many references.

Once your changes are saved, they take effect immediately.

The second part of the video is dedicated to the Tags.

Tags.

The tagging feature enables you to associate your products with keywords. Your customers can use the keywords to easily and quickly find the products they are looking for.

You have two ways to set up this feature.

First solution: When creating a new product.

You can associate several tags to your product from the moment you create it in PrestaShop, directly in the “Tags” field in the product’s “Options”.

Second solution: Managing Tags.

The “Tags” page under the “Search” menu enables you to create new tags and manage existing tags. Once you have given tags to your products, you will get a very important list of tags. The “Tags” page will help you manage them all.

To create a new one, click on “Add new tag”, and a creation page appears.

This interface enables you to add tags to one or many of your products.

• Name – Give your tag a name.
• Language – Indicate in what language the tag should appear on your shop. PrestaShop is clever enough not to display keywords in Spanish to customers who chose to see the French version of the site, for instance.
• Products – Select the products from the right column to which you would like to apply the tag. Hold on the Ctrl key on your keyboard in order to select several products at once.

Once you save the page, the named tag will be applied to all the products listed in the list on the right.

To add the same tag for another language, just repeat the operation, only this time, change the language.

After saving the tag, you are redirected to the list of tags, where you can edit or delete them, or even bulk delete them using the button at the bottom of the list.

Next to the edit and trash icons, a number indicates how many products use the tag.

From now on, when your customers make a search query on your site, the results they will receive will also depend on the tags that you have associated with the products.

We are now done with the section configuring your shop parameters.