SpotFind Fast Search for WooCommerce

Made by Flying Star, a WordPress and WooCommerce studio in India. Built by Niral Sura. SpotFind is our own search plugin: fast, on your own server, no third-party service.

SpotFind keeps one row per product in its own table, builds a small search file from it, and lets the visitor’s browser search that file locally. Typing never wakes PHP or the database.

Built so it cannot slow your site

• Before anyone touches a search box the plugin adds one 1.2 KB inline script and makes no request. No stylesheet, no script file.

• The first click or focus loads the app. Parsing and searching run in a Web Worker, so the page stays responsive.

• Visitors never trigger an index rebuild. Rebuilds run in the background, one at a time, with a lock, a time limit and a memory raise.

• A product save is never blocked: if SpotFind fails, the error is logged and the save carries on.

• Index files have versioned names and are served with a one-year cache header (Apache and LiteSpeed).

• Emergency switch: define( 'SPOTFIND_DISABLE', true ); in wp-config.php.

Search

• Typo correction (“cannon” finds Canon)

• Model numbers (“a7 iv” finds “A7IV”)

• Accessories rank below the product they are made for

• Matching name and brand outranks a name-only mention

• Synonyms you define

• Best sellers and in-stock products rank higher

• Category and brand rows, recent searches, popular products

• Sale price with the regular price struck through and % off

• Optional voice search (browser speech recognition)

• Works with any theme: it attaches to the existing search box, wherever it sits (header, sidebar, mobile menu, pop-up, block editor Search block)

• Put a search box anywhere with the shortcode [spotfind_search], or point SpotFind at a search box with a CSS selector

• The “See all results” page uses your theme’s own product grid, ranked by the same engine

Looks

• Match my theme (default): reads the search box’s own font, corners and colours, so the dropdown looks like part of your theme with no setup

• Glass: a frosted, Apple-style panel that picks light or dark from the page behind the search box. The blur runs on the open panel only and falls back to a solid panel when the visitor asks for less transparency

• Presets: Light, Dark, follow the visitor’s device, High contrast

• Category and brand chips, sale badges, keyboard hints

• Accent colour, corner radius, comfortable or compact rows

• Keyboard and screen reader friendly, respects reduced motion

SpotFind Pro

Pro is a separate plugin from Flying Star that adds to this one. The free plugin keeps its full search engine, with no product limit.

• Search analytics: top searches, searches that found nothing, click rate. Costs nothing while typing: the browser sends one small message when the visitor leaves, and the totals are saved every 15 minutes. One click deletes every record.

• Add a synonym straight from a search that found nothing

• Pin, boost or bury products for a search, with a product finder

• Redirects: “returns” goes to your returns page

• Leave categories and products out of search, and pick which fields are searched

• Rebuild only at night, wait out product imports, switch search off on chosen pages

• Filters on the results page: in stock, price range and brand

• Search variation SKUs and options such as size and colour

• Updates from your WordPress dashboard

in.

Its own table

SpotFind stores products in {prefix}spotfind_items, never in posts or postmeta, and never searches them either. When a product is added, edited, trashed or its stock changes, only that product’s row is updated. A daily resync repairs anything changed behind WordPress’s back.

Settings, Maintenance shows the table size and has Optimise, Resync and Rebuild buttons. Uninstalling drops the table.

WP-CLI: wp spotfind sync, wp spotfind rebuild [--sync].

Prices and stock in the dropdown are as of the last rebuild.

Privacy

Searching sends nothing to any server. If voice search is on, the visitor’s browser sends the spoken audio to its own speech service (Google for Chrome, Apple for Safari). Turn the microphone off in Settings, SpotFind.