Avalon23 Products Filter for WooCommerce

Help Your Customers Find Your Products

An effective filter is one of the most important functions of an online store. Make sure your customer can always find what they’re searching for in your store with the Avalon23 Products Filter for WooCommerce!

Product benefits:

• Save search query(filter memory) This function allows the user to save the search query. And when switching to another page or if the user visits the page the next day, the filter selection will remain. Demo( a widget “Filter with memory”) – demo site of car parts.  The user can now select filtering once and
  always get interesting products – this improves the user experience
• Hierarchy dropdown This type of filter only works with hierarchical taxonomy. You can see how it works here Demo1 AND Demo2. This type of filter has the feature of switching the image depending on the hierarchy level(You can check  it  here “Tyres”). This helps the user to correctly navigate the search.
• Skins Filters can have different color schemes. These are specially selected color patterns that will help you integrate the filter into your website design.
• Performance The plugin has options to optimize CSS and JS files. Also caching which reduces the number of queries to the database. Also, flexible configuration of each filter element will allow you to optimize queries by disabling dynamic recalculation where it is not needed.
• Text search by attribute Text search can work not only by title and description of products, but also by taxonomies(Attributes, Categories, Tags)
• Search by ACF fieds Filtering by fields of this type: Text, Text Area, Number, Range, Select, Radio Button, Button Group, True/False, Date Time Picker
• Meta filter The plugin has the ability to configure filters for custom fields (ACF fields are added automatically). There is a wide range of filter types for meta fields: Radio/Checkbox/Label/Dropdown/Slider/Text input/Datepicker/Color/Image
• Flexibility, The plugin has the ability to adjust the width and visibility of each filter element depending on the device. This is very useful if you place the filter horizontally. Also, each filter container can be toggled depending on the device – this will make the filter compact for mobile devices.
• WCAG 2.0
• SEO URLs The search query can have a human-readable form in the URL. An example: https…………….com/search/color-red/season-autumn/product_cat-hoodies/  And the plugin also has SEO settings that improve the indexing of pages with search results.
• Search logic IN/AND/NOT IN. Customizing the comparison logic can fine-tune the search results to suit your business. For example, NOT IN logic can exclude products with a certain attribute, this is useful for a grocery store to exclude ingredients that could cause allergies.
• Ajax  mode. Fast and light Ajax filtering. In this mode, filtering occurs without reloading the page. Attention: Ajax mode may not work correctly on some themes
• Predefinition allows to display filter that adapts to the current request by default(prefiltration). For example you can display the filter only for a specific attribute or only for discounted products
• [avalon23_content] This is a special shortcode that can hide/show content depending on the current search. More details can be found here

Short demo of plugin settings:

Let’s get started!

So let’s get started! You have installed Avalon23 on your website. After activating the plugin, you will see a menu for accessing the main settings:

On the settings page you can add a filter:

Each filter has its own shortcode that can be inserted into the content to display the filter, or you can use a widget. You can also add a title to quickly find the filter (this title is not displayed at the front).

To add elements to the filter, for example, filter by price, by category, etc., click on the “gear” icon:

Now you can add standard filters, filters by taxonomy or metafields

Filters can be activated or deactivated to hide or show them at the front. You can read more about the settings here

Note: if you do not see the options fields (like on the demo site) “color”, “size”, “location”, etc. are taxonomies. Just create an attribute with this name.

Now you can show these filters using a widget or shortcode

When you see the first result, you can go to the main setting of this filter:

In this tab, you can configure the filter so that it performs a search on the first click (autosubmit) on the filter element:

Or you can make a filtration in Ajax mode:

Or you can hide filters that give zero products in the current search query:

Read more about these settings here.

Congratulations, you’ve learned the basic filter settings!

Further, we recommend reading useful information that will help improve your filter and make your site more attractive and user-friendly:

WordPress has a huge number of themes, and each theme has its own styles and colors. Each owner wants a unique design, wanting to make their business stand out. Unfortunately, it is not possible to make filter styles to fit all themes. For this, we have developed functionality that will help you choose filter styles for your theme.

You can easily change the color scheme of the filter to suit your website design:

You can see examples here

If you have experience with CSS, you can create custom styles

It is sometimes very useful to create a page with a specific set of products to highlight them for the buyer. For example, discounted products, or products from a specific category, or a specific color and size, or a specific author. And even if you don’t have many products, it’s better to add a filter to this page. In order for the plugin to show only relevant filters, use the Predefinition setting:

You can see examples here or here

Read the documentation for more details

Over time, the assortment of even a small store grows, and you already start dealing with a large number of products, and more resources are spent on filtering. This slows down page loading even for powerful servers. But the number of taxonomies (attributes and categories) affects the loading speed even more. Therefore, you should pay attention to optimization so that slow filtering does not annoy customers, and this does not lead to lost sales. We have developed a number of settings to help solve this problem.

You can optimize filtering. This option is useful in the “First level of optimization” main setting tab if there are many filters by meta fields:

“Advanced optimization” – this setting caches all your filters and reduces the number of database queries:

Optimization of loading JS and CSS files:

A lot of resources are wasted on dynamic recalculation, because a query is made to the database for each filter element. This is necessary in order to receive up-to-date data for the counters. To optimize this process, you can turn off dynamic recalculation for unimportant filters. Example here

You can read more here

Our plugin has different types of filters like drop-down, slider, checkbox, color, etc. Since you can have a different number of checkboxes or, for example, a different slider range, in order for the filter to look more compact and, also, for the convenience of the user, you can arrange the filter elements in columns of different widths, and in turn, the width of these columns will be depend on device screen width:

You can display some types of filters in a compact form (drop-down list) in the filter element settings:

This is how it should work:

You can see an example here

Depending on the type of commercial activity of your store, different filtering logic may be required. For example, you are selling food and you want to exclude products by ingredient so that the user can see products that do not cause him allergies. In this case, the logic “NOT IN” will be useful.

Or, for example, you sell electronic devices. And the user must receive a product that contains all the selected technologies (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 5G). In this case, “AND” logic will be useful.

This option is available for filters by taxonomy:

IN – will show all products that have at least one of the selected terms.

AND – will show the products that have all the selected terms.

NOT IN – will show all products that do not have the selected terms.

You can see an example here

About other settings, please read the documentation 

Requirements

Minimum PHP version: 7.0