FastSearch SQLite - ultra fast product search for WooCommerce

FastSearch SQLite is a dedicated search plugin for WooCommerce that will lighten the load on your WordPress database and bring your online store significantly faster product searches. Instead of traditional MySQL querying, it uses a custom index in a SQLite file, stored outside of the main WordPress database. In practice, this means instant product suggestions after just a few characters are entered and smooth operation even on shared hosting or under heavy load.

The plugin continuously indexes all published WooCommerce products - name, SKU, brand, category and, depending on the settings, short and long product description. It normalizes the text during indexing (removes diacritics, takes into account variants without spaces and hyphens), so the search can handle „TOP-432“ vs „top432“, different typos and different spellings of product codes. Results are sorted by relevance - first products whose name starts with the entered term, then those where the term is in the middle of the text.

Customers are shown results in the form of AJAX suggestions directly below the search box - without page reload. For each product you can display the name, SKU, price and thumbnail, depending on what you set in the administration. In addition to products, the plugin can also offer matching categories and an „All Results“ link that redirects the user to a standard WordPress results page with default or limited post type (products only / all content).

FastSearch SQLite can connect to an existing search field in the theme (e.g. in the header) or you can use it on its own via the shortcode [fastsearch_sqlite_search] anywhere in the content. The shortcode has its own appearance settings - width, border color, background, text color and placeholder text - so you can easily adapt it to your e-shop design without the need for CSS editing.

For large catalogs, batch reindexing via WordPress cron is ready. The index is created in parts (batch mode) without using slow OFFSET pagination, so it is also suitable for e-shops with tens of thousands of products. The automatic reindexation schedule (daily, weekly, monthly) makes sure that new and modified products are always included in searches without manual intervention.

Main features and benefits

• Separate SQLite index outside WordPress/MySQL (lower database load).
• Ultra fast AJAX product designs from 2 characters.
• Indexing of title, SKUs, tags, categories, optionally short/long descriptions.
• Intelligent text normalization.
• Relevance ordering: name starts with expression → name contains expression → other matches.
• Show categories before products + option to filter to main categories only.
• Optional price and thumbnail display already directly in the designs.
• Suggestions of corrected/alternative expression according to the headlines of the products found.
• Link to search topic (input[type=“search“]) or custom shortcode.
• Fully configurable appearance of the search box shortcode.
• Manual and automatic reindexing (cron) with batch processing.
• Slovak administration interface and settings directly in WooCommerce menu.
• No dependency on external indexing services - everything runs on your hosting.

Search speed and performance (a section you can add to the page)

FastSearch SQLite is designed primarily for performance. Instead of complex JOIN queries to a WordPress database, it works with a compact table in SQLite, optimized for search only. For each AJAX query, only one lightweight SELECT is run over the prebuilt index, and WordPress doesn't need to retrieve entire product objects, price calculations, or images - these are already stored when indexing.

In practice, this means:

• design response in the order of tenths of a second even for larger catalogues,
• stable behaviour at peak (many concurrent requests),
• better fluidity of the entire e-shop, because the server is not overwhelmed by slow searches.

Batch reindexing uses so-called „keyset paging“ (ID > last_id), so it does not hamper the database with heavy OFFSET queries even with repeated executions. Combined with scheduled reindexation, you always have an up-to-date index without manual intervention and without search failures.

The indexing speed was tested on shared hosting. With 49 000 products, indexing took about 110 minutes.

Plugin is possible test here.