Elastic Jet Search for PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a great platform for building and running an online store — open source, mature, and flexible enough to handle catalogues of almost any size. Its built-in search, though, wasn't designed for very large catalogues: once a store grows into the tens or hundreds of thousands of products, search results take noticeably longer to appear, and customers lose patience long before the page does.

It's a complete replacement of PrestaShop's standard search functionality, designed to improve search on two fronts at once: speed and quality of results. As well as returning results far faster on large catalogues, it gives customers proper full-text search — matching across product fields, handling misspellings, and surfacing relevant results that the native search would miss. Merchants can tune all of this to their own catalogue and content, rather than relying on PrestaShop's fixed defaults.

It runs on Elasticsearch, which handles text search reliably across catalogues in the tens or hundreds of thousands of products — a range where PrestaShop's native search tends to slow down and lose accuracy.

Search Relevancy And Control

The module gives merchants a set of concrete options for shaping how search behaves, rather than a single fixed algorithm:

Strong keyword relevancy out of the box, with room to adjust further
Multiple options for controlling how and when the database index updates
A choice between AND or OR logic for keyword matching
Control over which data fields are searched
Field weighting, so more important data (like product names) can outrank less important fields
Minimum and maximum keyword length settings
Match fuzziness, which returns relevant results even when a search term is misspelled
Cross-field search
Automatic exclusion of stop words — common terms too frequent to be useful for matching

Each of these can be adjusted independently, so merchants aren't stuck with a one-size-fits-all setup.

Search Speed

Because Elasticsearch is purpose-built for this kind of indexing and querying, the speed improvement over native PrestaShop search is significant — and the gap widens as catalogue size grows. Stores with around 10,000 products or more see the clearest benefit.

Catalogue Size

There's no fixed upper limit on the number of products the module can handle. It was tested with a catalogue of 500,000 products and performed well throughout, and it can scale beyond that. At that volume, queries were still executed very quickly — including the two scenarios that most often cause slowdowns: faceted search, which typically strains large catalogues, and complex keyword queries, including ones containing misspellings. In short, even very large stores can expect fast, responsive search rather than the delays that tend to appear as a catalogue grows.

Indexing

Products need to be indexed by Elasticsearch before they become searchable. As a rough guide, indexing takes around 10 minutes per 100,000 products on an average modern dedicated server. The actual time varies depending on the number of product categories, attributes and other parameters attached to each product, as well as on server performance.

Elasticsearch Requirement

The module needs an Elasticsearch instance to run — it doesn't work with PrestaShop's default database search alone. There are two ways to set this up: install Elasticsearch on the same server as the PrestaShop store, or connect to a remote Elasticsearch hosting provider (which may involve its own fees, separate from the module itself).

Installing Elasticsearch is straightforward for anyone with basic Linux administration knowledge — it's a standard service install, not a complex undertaking. Merchants without that experience, or without a system administrator on hand, may find the remote hosting route simpler to get running.

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!).