Magento 2: Our New Extension is Here, and It’s Full of New Features

Search on an e-commerce website is a tricky subject: if you want to win and keep customers, you need to stay ahead of the digital experience game. Our Magento customers trust us to help with the job. Here is how the new Algolia extension for Magento 2 goes further.

Infinite scrolling

You called for it and now you have it! No more annoying paginating for your customers. Offer them a smooth browsing of your catalog while staying on the same page. Just turn it on in Algolia configuration in Magento and you’re all set!

Standard pagination:

Infinite scrolling:

Adaptive images

Have your users been searching for a black jacket, blue t-shirt, or a pair of orange shorts — and all they got was a results page full of images of products in different colors? It won’t happen again. The extension now indexes images of all colors, and whether you’re searching for an item in a certain color or filtering by color, the right images will be displayed on the results page.

No more confusion and frustration for your customers.

Prevent backend rendering

Don’t let your customers wait while you load and generate all pages on a server. Algolia extension re-renders the page on the front end anyway. The extension now comes with an experimental feature to disable HTML generation of a catalog on your server.

It removes all HTML of the catalog from generated HTML code. This means that search crawlers like Googlebot, Bingbot and others might not find all your products and remove some pages from their indices.

Before enabling this feature, please read the documentation and make sure you watch your search engine traffic.

Search for facet values

If you have a large store with a lot of attributes and their values, you’ll definitely benefit from the search for facet values feature. The feature adds a search bar on top of your filters and lets your customers search for the right value. Search for facet values includes highlighting to make it as smooth as possible for the customers.

Developer-friendly

The extension comes with many ways to extend it, modify its functionality, and handle every edge case. This way, your developers don’t have to spend their precious time on writing a boilerplate code — we did it for them.

Here’s a custom Algolia Magento 2 extension that helps write event listeners, override templates, and modify the frontend. All events you can use can be found here:

• Front-end events
• Back-end events

What comes next?

We’ve heard you’re missing custom sorting of products on a category basis, and that’s exactly what you can expect from the next version. If you use the extension for category listings, in the next version it’ll respect the order of products in categories as you set it in category configuration.

Stay in touch

The most important part of the extension is… you! — the users of the extension. Whether you are a store manager, designer or developer, feedback is welcome!  Drop us a line, create an issue, send a pull request or show us what you build on the Algolia forum.

We’ll be happy to see you around 🙂 .