July 2, 2026

Why a Good Multilingual Search Function Is Important for International Growth

Your website has been translated. Products are listed online in multiple languages, the URLs are optimized for international SEO, and more and more international visitors are finding your online store. But what happens when a visitor searches for a specific product?

This is precisely where many international WordPress and WooCommerce websites miss opportunities. You invest in translations, SEO, and localized content, but the search function often lags behind. And that’s a shame, because visitors who use the search function usually have a clear goal: they want to find the right product or the right information as quickly as possible.

Research by the Baymard Institute shows that about half of all e-commerce visitors use the search function as their primary way to find products. At the same time, 56% of the online stores surveyed still offer a mediocre or poor search experience. For multilingual WordPress and WooCommerce websites, this challenge only grows.

Why is a multilingual search function so important?

An international website is more than just a translated version of your original website. Visitors expect the same experience, regardless of the language in which they visit your website. They want to find products, navigate through categories, use filters, and get relevant search results.

Is the search function not working properly? That immediately creates friction. Products are hard to find, new content doesn’t appear in search results, or visitors are shown irrelevant results. This significantly increases the likelihood that they’ll abandon the site and switch to a competitor. A good multilingual search function is therefore not a luxury but a crucial part of the user experience and your international growth.

A practical example

Suppose you have a WooCommerce online store selling sporting goods in the Netherlands, Germany, and France. You’re introducing a new running shoe and putting it online immediately. The product page has been translated, inventory has been updated, and the campaign is ready to go live.

A German visitor lands on your online store via Google and searches for “Laufschuhe Damen.” A French visitor searches for “chaussures de running femme.” They expect to see the new model right away in the search results. But that doesn’t happen.

The search function has not yet indexed the latest content, searches only a portion of the translated content, or fails to recognize translated product attributes. The product is therefore available but cannot be found via the search function. The visitor assumes you don’t sell the product, tries a competitor, and leaves. A missed sale, even though the product is right there in your online store.

Why a multilingual WordPress search function is more complex

On a monolingual website, a search function searches only one version of your content. With a multilingual WordPress or WooCommerce website, that changes. The search function must not only search pages but also:

products and product features;
categories;
pages;
blog articles;
metadata;
Translated content.

In addition, new products, price changes, and updated content must be discoverable as quickly as possible in every language.

Translation is only the first step

Many organizations rightly invest in translating their websites. But a well-translated online store does not necessarily equate to a well-functioning international online store. International visitors judge your website based on the overall user experience. They expect everything to work just as well as it does on your original website, including the search function.

For e-commerce managers, this means visitors find the right products faster and are more likely to convert. For developers, the focus is on a search solution that is easy to manage, automatically scales with new content, and integrates well with WordPress and WooCommerce.

International growth therefore requires more than just good translations. The search function must also provide the same experience in every language.

At Clonable , we see every day how organizations internationalize their WordPress and WooCommerce websites. In doing so, we consistently encountered the same challenge: the website had been translated, but the search function didn’t always align with that. New products or pages weren’t immediately findable in every language, meaning visitors didn’t always find what they were looking for.

That’s why we developed the Clonable Search Widget. The widget automatically indexes products, pages, posts, and metadata, ensuring that search results remain up-to-date and visitors can find the right content faster in any language.

Now available as a beta

Every WordPress website is different. Themes, plugins, and customizations all influence how a search function performs. That’s why we’re first releasing the Clonable Search Widget as a beta. Together with customers, we’re testing the widget in a variety of WordPress and WooCommerce environments. Their feedback helps us further improve the search experience before the widget becomes generally available.

Do you use Clonable for WordPress or WooCommerce? Then you can try out the Search Widget right away using the latest version of the Clonable plugin. Since this is a beta, we’d really appreciate your feedback. That way, we can work together to make the widget even better.