People who search are ready to buy. If your search box answers "no results" to a brand name, a product code or a small typo, the customer leaves. This module replaces the standard PrestaShop search and faceted navigation with a search box, an autocomplete and a filter system that work on the database you already have.
The built-in engine: no server at all
The module carries its own engine, working directly on your PrestaShop database. Results page, full-screen autocomplete, faceted filters, per-category filter templates, SEO filter pages and search analytics all work as soon as you turn on the search on the module page, even on shared hosting, with nothing external to install and no service to subscribe to.
How fast it is: on a real customer shop with 4,572 products, applying a filter went from about 10 seconds to under a second with the listing optimisation released in version 3.0.3. That was measured on the built-in engine, with no Elasticsearch, on a catalogue of a size that is normal for a PrestaShop shop.
The external engines below are an upgrade, not a requirement: for the vast majority of shops the built-in engine is the right choice, and you will never have to think about them.
Elasticsearch 6, 7, 8 and 9
When the catalogue grows, or when you want typo tolerance and synonyms, you connect Elasticsearch from the back office in a few clicks. You get spelling correction (someone typing "guitr" finds the guitars), synonyms, per-language stemming, relevance scoring with per-field weights, and an index that updates as soon as a product, a price, a stock level or a combination changes.
You can list several servers, with basic authentication or an API key, and set a base path for shared clusters. A token-protected cron endpoint reindexes large catalogues in resumable batches, within a time budget you choose.
How much it matters: on a test shop with 200,020 products, on the same machine, the built-in engine served the search results page in 6.1 seconds and the category page in 3.6 seconds; with Elasticsearch connected they dropped to 0.7 and 0.4 seconds. That is the honest reason external engines exist in this module.
OpenSearch
OpenSearch is supported with the same panel, the same indexing and the same search features as Elasticsearch: it is the natural choice when your host or cloud provider offers OpenSearch instead. You configure it the same way, with host, port, authentication and base path.
Meilisearch
Meilisearch is the lightweight alternative: quick to install, easy on resources, and it still gives you typo tolerance and instant search. In the module you configure host, port, API key and index prefix, and it uses the same reindexing assistant as the other engines.
Customers find the product, even when they spell it wrong
Search looks at the product name, reference, EAN, UPC, MPN, brand name and descriptions. A customer typing a brand that appears in no product title still gets that brand's products; someone pasting a code sees the right product first.
Autocomplete opens as a dropdown or as a full-screen panel, showing products with image, price and a badge (product type, main category or reference), plus matching categories, brands and content pages. You choose how many suggestions to show, the image format, the badge and the placeholder text, per language.
Filters that lead the customer to the right product
Faceted navigation on categories, search results, brand pages, supplier pages, offers, new arrivals and best sellers. Available facets: categories, brand, price slider, availability, new, on sale, condition, every product feature and every attribute, with colours shown as swatches. Each facet can be checkboxes, radio buttons, a dropdown, a swatch grid or a slider, with its own label, position, AND or OR mode, collapsed state, value limit, "hide empty" rule and a search box inside long value lists.
The filter panel opens as a window above the product grid, with a "Filters" button, or as a classic left column. Active filters stay visible as chips the customer can remove one by one, and a "Show results" button closes the panel. With result counts on (the default with an external engine), the count updates as they choose and the button reads "Show N results".
Different filters for different categories
Shoes need size and colour, drills need voltage and chuck size. With filter templates you decide which facets appear in each category, assign the template to one or more categories, let subcategories inherit it and, if you want, reuse it on the search page. A default template covers everything else.
The combinations that matter become pages Google can rank
"Shoes plus brand plus colour" is a page customers search for. Whitelist that combination as an SEO filter page and give it its own meta title, meta description, heading and intro text, per language. The page becomes indexable with its own canonical address, while every other filtered address stays noindex, follow: landing pages without duplicate content.
You know what customers search for, and what they do not find
The analytics tab shows total searches, distinct queries, the most frequent ones with their average result count, and the most valuable list of all: the searches that returned nothing. Every empty row has a button to add a synonym and fix it (synonyms apply with an external engine). Only the query text is stored, no personal data, and you choose how many days to keep it.
Prices are always the real ones
On every engine the price facet and price sorting use a per-visitor cached price index: the price the customer sees and filters by is exactly the one PrestaShop calculates, including group prices, taxes and currencies. For individual B2B price lists you choose whether to index them, show a notice, or both.
What you control from the back office
- Dashboard with engine status, indexed items per shop and per language, one-click reindexing and the cron and command line endpoints.
- Search: minimum word length, operator, searchable fields per document type; with an external engine also stemming, stop words, elision, synonyms, spelling correction, infix matching and per-field weights.
- Output: products per page, default sort order, which sort orders to offer, autocomplete style and content, filter panel style.
- Listing: hide out-of-stock products, sort the category by position or by brand priority, exclude feature values.
- Themes: three CSS selectors (product list, search box, filter button) to attach the module to any theme without touching its code.
- Your custom.css is created at install time and never overwritten by an update.
- Conflict check: the module warns you if another search or faceted navigation module is still active, and turns it off from the same screen.
Compatibility
- Compatible with PrestaShop 1.7.7 / 8 / 9. Tested on 1.7.8, 8.1, 9.0 and 9.1.
- PHP 7.1 to 8.4.
- Multistore, with per-shop configuration.
- Back office in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Dutch.
- 12 months of updates included, renewal optional afterwards.
📚 Module installation and configuration guide
Why search slows down on large catalogues and how to measure it before deciding: Slow search and wrong filters on PrestaShop.
Try the module liveTry instant search and faceted navigation on a real demo PrestaShop, and configure Elasticsearch Search & Faceted Navigation from the back office.
Open the demo →
Config back office: demo@demo.com / demodemo (read-only), demo.presta365.com/admin-demo.
📚 How faceted search actually works in Elasticsearch (engineering deep dive)
📚 How typo-tolerant search actually works (technical article)
