Super Speedy Search latest updates have made postmeta search even faster than before, about 3 seconds against a million products.
But – 3 seconds is still quite slow, and if you remove the meta search then the SQL query is blindingly fast – negligible load on your server.
It seems in the majority of cases, users are enabling the _SKU meta item to be searched and not really using meta search for anything else. Because of this, I think there may be a sort of cheat I can implement to speed search up further.
What I’m thinking is that many stores will have a prefix or a pattern of some kind for their SKUs –
* Maybe SKUs are always a minimum length?
* Presumably SKUs are always 1 word?
* Maybe SKUs have some kind of pattern – like they always start with WPI or something similar for your store?
What I’m thinking is that I could add a pattern test to the search string to check if postmeta should be searched at all, and if the pattern test fails then skip searching postmeta.
For example, you could configure: WPI* as the pattern for your metadata searches to be activated and then if a user searches for “Dell Monitor” it would skip checking postmeta. If a user searches for WPIX1023 then it *would* search postmeta.
The idea being that this would speed up product search massively for your users who are probably mostly not entering SKUs – I’m presuming again that this addition of SKU search is actually mostly for the benefit of your site admins?
Please provide as much info as possible to help here so I can make Super Speedy Search *even* faster than it already is!
October 6, 2020 @ 3:26 am
Hi Dave
Thanks for improving the search speed. Regarding the above, _SKU would be the only meta item which I enable for search. I have considered just adding the SKU to the end of the title so that I don’t have to enable the _SKU meta item. For our store, the SKU’s don’t have any pattern as we sell products from hundreds of different vendors and they all have their own patterns. I can often recognise the manufacturer of the product just by the format of their SKU. For example, the latest 10 products ordered on our site have the following SKU; EYV-00029 (Microsoft), WF40 (Yealink), 27X0135 (Lexmark), TS5160BK (Canon), ATA191-3PW-K9 (Cisco), MAC-A (Brateck), FZ-VSTM11U (Panasonic), R2000DB (Edifier), ROC-11-725-WE-AS (Roccatt), LDT12-C1M2KN (Brateck). If the user knows exactly what product they need then it’s much easier to search by SKU to find what they are looking for. I would think that this would be the case for technology products, rather than clothes or bespoke products.
Regards
Roger