A live suggestion dropdown for PrestaShop's search field, showing products, categories, brands and pages as the customer types.
Most PrestaShop stores treat search as a two-step process: the customer types a phrase, presses enter, waits for a results page, and only then finds out whether the store carries what they came for. If the results are wrong, they edit the phrase and do it again. Each round trip is a chance to lose them.
Savvy Search Autocomplete removes that gap. Suggestions appear underneath the search field while the customer is still typing, and they can go straight to a product, a category or a brand page without ever loading a results page. It also does something the results page can't: it shows the shape of what the store carries. A customer typing "wool" sees not just matching products but the categories and brands those products sit in, which is often a better route than the product they happened to match first.
What Appears In The Dropdown
Each of these can be switched on or off independently, so the dropdown shows what suits the catalogue rather than everything at once:
- Keyword suggestions, drawn from product attributes, tags and other catalogue data
- Categories whose names match the search phrase
- Categories that contain matching products, even when the category name itself doesn't match
- Brands whose names match the search phrase
- Brands that carry matching products
- Products, shown either as a compact list or as cards with image, price and an Add to Cart button
- CMS pages
The two category options are worth separating, because they answer different questions. A search for "waterproof" may match no category name at all, while matching products spread across Jackets, Footwear and Tents. Enabling both gives the customer a direct route when one exists and a content-based route when it doesn't. The same applies to the two brand options.
Three Dropdown Layouts
The same suggestions can be presented three ways, switched from the settings page without touching a template:
- Showcase — a wide panel carrying up to three rows of product cards, for catalogues where the image is what makes the decision
- Classic List — a single column of suggestions, which suits narrow headers and text-led catalogues
- Split Columns — text links in one column with product cards alongside, for stores where category and brand navigation matters as much as individual products
Switching between them is immediate and doesn't disturb which suggestion types are enabled or the order they appear in.
Appearance
The module ships looking tidy and works as installed. Beyond that, the admin interface lets merchants set the colours of the dropdown's elements — backgrounds, text, borders, hover states — so it sits inside an existing theme rather than on top of it. The markup and stylesheets follow PrestaShop's own conventions, which is what makes that possible without fighting the theme.
Filtering On Category And Brand Pages
Suggestions aren't the only place search can help. The module can also filter category and brand listing pages down to the products matching a search phrase, so a customer already browsing a category can narrow it in place instead of leaving for a separate results page.
This part depends on PrestaShop's Faceted Search module, version 4.0 or later. That version ships with PrestaShop 8.2 and above; on earlier 8.x releases it needs installing or updating separately. Without it, page filtering is unavailable and the rest of the module works as normal.
Speed And Large Catalogues
The dropdown fires a request on every few keystrokes, so those requests have to stay cheap. They're written to stay responsive against large volumes of data, and the front-end code has no jQuery dependency — on themes that don't otherwise load jQuery, that's roughly 350 KB less to download per page.
For catalogues large enough that database search itself becomes the constraint, the module works alongside Elastic Jet Search, which replaces PrestaShop's native search with Elasticsearch. With it installed, suggestions are ordered by how closely they match what was typed, with dropdown categories following. Elastic Jet Search takes over some of the module's own search settings when it's active; rather than leaving those fields to mislead, the module greys them out and explains on the settings page why they no longer apply.
Languages And Scripts
Search handles non-Latin scripts, including Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic, in both the typed phrase and the catalogue data being matched against.
Translations
The module is available in English, Spanish, French, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Dutch, Croatian, Turkish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Greek, Czech, Swedish, Catalan, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Modern Standard Arabic.
The module's admin interface follows whichever language is set in the admin's own profile, and only languages already enabled on the store appear as options there. In practice, this means a merchant won't see a language like French in the module unless French is already active as a store language — the module doesn't add new language options to the admin panel on its own.
Multi-Store
The module supports PrestaShop's multi-store setup. Each store in an installation can run its own layout, its own selection of suggestion types and its own colours, and suggestions are always drawn from the catalogue of the store the customer is browsing.
Supported Versions
Version 6 of the module is built for PrestaShop 8.0 through 9.x and requires PHP 8.1 or later.
Version 5 remains available for stores still running PrestaShop 1.6 and 1.7.
Demo & Download
You can explore the module on a live PrestaShop store. The frontend demo shows the search experience as customers see it: prestashop.giantleaplab.com.
The backend demo lets you review the module's configuration options directly: prestashop.giantleaplab.com/admin-demo
(login: demo@example.com / password: demo123!).
To download the module, visit the PrestaShop Addons Marketplace: http://addons.prestashop.com/ru/22777-savvy-search-autocomplete.html
Installation
Please follow the standard PrestaShop guidance to install the module on your hosted PrestaShop store or in the cloud (http://addons.prestashop.com/en/content/21-how-to). The module does not require any specific actions during installation. Once it is installed, you may want to go through the module settings in the control panel to customize its look and behaviour.
