Faceted search for WooCommerce

What faceted search is — and why counts are the point

Facets are filters generated from the results themselves, each labelled with how many results it holds. Search “jacket” and a facet rail doesn’t just offer “Brand” — it offers this brand, with 12 in-stock jackets behind it, recalculated live as the shopper refines. The counts are what make it feel effortless: shoppers never click into an empty page, because the interface told them what was behind every door before they opened it.

That’s also why faceting is brutal to run on a store database. Every facet count is another aggregation query, per facet, per keystroke, per refinement — precisely the workload a transactional MySQL database on shared hosting is worst at. Faceted search built on wp_postmeta is how a store’s search page becomes its slowest page.

What NitroSearch ships today — exactly

Results and facet counts come back together in a single round trip to the engine, so refining feels as instant as searching. The facets live today:

• Category — multi-select, matching your WooCommerce category tree.
• Brand — multi-select, with live counts per brand.
• In stock — one honest toggle for availability.
• On sale — surface the promotions inside any search.

They appear in the instant dropdown and on the full results page, with pagination and add-to-cart alongside. Two behaviours worth noticing, because their absence is what makes cheap faceting infuriating:

• Options don’t vanish when picked. Selecting one brand doesn’t hide the others — counts stay scoped to the search, so shoppers can broaden as easily as they narrow.
• Counts never lie. They’re computed by the engine with the results, not estimated — a facet promising 12 products delivers 12 products.

And the roadmap, labelled as roadmap: facets for price and for product attributes (size, colour, material) are coming, and until they ship you won’t find a page of ours implying otherwise.