Looking for a better WooCommerce Product Filter

  • We are currently building a WooCommerce store for a brick and click business (thousands of products with variants). Obviously we will need a good product filtering solution. I guess one can say, that we have checked out the full spectrum of popular commercial tools but considering data-flow between ERP and Woo and also Search Engine Optimization none of them (including those, popular among developers), really makes us happy.

    Factors we are looking for:

      Basics: Filter picks up all default and custom taxonomies /post types and serves all possible combinations of object properties and categories in a flexible filter GUI.
      User makes a manual / rule based choice of archives, which should be visible to Search Engines (SE). Selected archives show pretty URLs, are added to the sitemap and allow for typical SEO-Elements (Title, H1, SEO -Text)
      Remaining filter combinations (typically the vast majority) are consequently hidden from search engines (using typical strategies). Obviously such archives may show parameters in URLs.
      SEO-optimized filter-archives and hidden archives for complex, SE-irrelevant queries are accessed through the same filter-Interface.
      It should be possible to convert an archive from index-able to hidden and vice versa. Rule based assignment to index-able or invisible to crawlers may get overridden by user.
      The tool should come with a query builder (as most tools have). Users should be able save any number of filter-templates, which may get used as a starting point for further customization. It should just as easy, to only serve the result of a custom query, with no filters whatsoever visible on that particular page. Possible reasons: Filtering makes no sense, overall volume of products in this portfolio-section is low.

      Visible to search engines filter-archives (possibly many hundreds) are stored as a custom post type.

    What we would like to avoid:

      Filtered archives are either fully visible to Search Engines or fully hidden.
      The list of SEO Landingpages is stored somewhere inside a custom plugin interface.
      Redundant creation of index-able SEO Landingpages and perfectly identical, but hidden from SE archive pages. This is the needless duplication we would face, when utilizing any of the Ajax driven options.

    We have good developers on board, but we don’t want to develop a fully fledged product filter plugin on our own. We also aren’t looking for anyone else to do this – the (inhouse) project would not justify spending a lot of hours of custom development here. Then again… There’s like quite a few businesses worldwide, with physical stores and a WooCommerce powered Online Shop who use an ERP and a data-feed to WooCommerce. They – like us – likely face the situation, that none of the Product Filters is geared towards this use case.

    If you have an excellent background in product filtering and its respective SEO topics and from my description recall having done something pretty darn similar already – then please give us a shout :o).

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by H&S-Team.
    • This topic was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic
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