Algolia is the most popular cloud search & recommendations provider. You could want to integrate it into your Woocommerce or WordPress website.
Why use Algolia ?
Search
Algolia provides search of all kinds : simple keyword search, AI/vector search & personalized search.
Keyword search is available in the free tier. Keyword search works by matching the keywords in a search query to the ones present in the indexed items/documents. It can be simple and limited without any configuration but Algolia offers multiple features to fine-tune it.
For keyword search, you could define synonyms which is useful for expert websites. For example, if you have a medical website, you could need to set “acute myocardial infarction” as a synonym for heart attack. This way all the technical documents can be returned when typing the more commonly used word “heart attack”. Algolia can even set them automatically using AI if you need to.
AI search (or vector search) is available in more pricy plans. This type of search leverages AI to . This contains multiple types of search itself :
- Semantic search : doesn’t simply match keywords, but understands the context and meaning of the words and sentences to return the most relevant items. A fun fact about this type of search is that since it is based on vectors instead of keywords, it is a form of multilingual search.
- Image search : this search can return items that feature similar images or items with featured images which include specific objects.
Personalized search : this type of search will not rank results based solely on keyword or vector similarities. Instead, it customizes them for individual users, considering their unique preferences and behaviors. Aloglia will train it’s AI on your users’ past actions so that it can correctly predict what they will want or like to suggest the most relevant products to them.
Ajax search
Algolia can also provide autocompletion in the form of Ajax search. Algolia could autocomplete the text your users enter in the search bar and display the results below.
Facets (filters) & sorting
Algolia provides faceted search. Facets are a set of filterable categories that allow users to refine results by multiple categories simultaneously. This is especially useful for e-commerce (or Woocommerce) website so your users can browse specifically the types of products they want. You can configure faceting from the dashboard or the API.
Recommendations
Algolia is also a recommendation engine. Recommendation engines uses AI to suggest (or recommend) items that it predicts users will be inclined to view or buy. These predictions are based on patterns of users’ past behaviors and preferences.
It can recommend relevant content, items or products using either content-based or collaborative filtering.
Product recommendations greatly boosts sales (conversions), user engagement and product discovery. So it is no surprise that all improtant and successful e-commerce websites, especially Amazon, invest greatly in having the most relevant recommendations possible.
Analytics
Algolia provides detailed analytics in it’s dashboard so you can understand and rate your search & recommendations performance. The Algolia analytics track everything from clicks and conversions.
It also includes A/B testing so you can tune and test your search and recommendations in minutes.
How to integrate Algolia into WordPress or Woocommerce ?
Do it yourself
You could use the Algolia PHP API client to create your own WordPress and Woocommerce solution. This is a time-consuming and costly project since you have to setup everything yourself (indexing all of the data you want, creating your Ajax search, creating your user interface, sending events, error management, security, etc…).
Using WPSolr WordPress plugin
WPSolr is a search and recommendations plugin that can integrate many engines (Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, Opensearch, Algolia, Weavaite, Google Retail, Recombee, Vespa) into any WordPress & Woocommerce website to add invaluable features such as search, Ajax search, facets, RAG, recommendations and much more.
It is very easy to set up and does not require any programming requirements which will save you a ton of money and time.
