Most WooCommerce search solutions break down around 10,000 products. We built Smooth Search to handle 1,000,000+.

The Scaling Challenge

Traditional approaches use SQL’s LIKE queries:

SELECT * FROM wp_posts
WHERE post_title LIKE '%search term%'
LIMIT 10;

This scans entire tables. At 100K+ products, it’s unusable.

Our Solution: Inverted Index

We build an inverted index - the same data structure powering Elasticsearch, but optimized for WooCommerce:

  1. Incremental indexing - Only reindex changed products
  2. Compressed storage - 1M products in ~50MB
  3. Client-side search - Index loads once, searches run in-browser
  4. Smart ranking - TF-IDF scoring with product-specific boosts

Real Results

A fashion retailer with 500,000 SKUs saw:

  • Search queries: 3.2 seconds → 12ms
  • Server load: -95% (searches now client-side)
  • Conversion rate: +18% (users find products faster)

The key insight: you don’t need a separate search service. You need a better architecture that leverages the client’s CPU.