The evidence
When a shop’s search or filters take seconds, people notice. This page collects the outside studies that look at speed and shop search, in plain words, each with who ran it, who paid for it and what it cannot tell you.
We list them so you can judge for yourself. None of them is about our product.
Eight studies
Findings are paraphrased. Every source link opens in a new tab and was checked on 4 October 2026.
Across 37 brand sites, a 0.1 second improvement in four mobile speed measures went together with 8.4% higher conversion on retail sites.
When Google added 100 to 400 milliseconds to its search results in a controlled test, people searched a little less (0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches per user), and some of the drop stayed after the delay was removed.
Baymard rated the search of 170+ e-commerce sites and apps and found 56% do not adequately support what shoppers try to search for. In a separate benchmark of 344 sites, 68% show a no-results page that is a dead end.
In an analysis of 609 million searches on 113 retail sites, shoppers who used search were 24% of traffic and 44% of revenue.
In 2024, 34% of WooCommerce sites had a good mobile Largest Contentful Paint, below Shopify, OpenCart and Shopware.
About 0.1 seconds feels instant, about 1 second keeps a person’s train of thought unbroken, and 10 seconds is about the limit of their attention.
In a 50/50 A/B test, Vodafone’s faster page variant (31% better Largest Contentful Paint) produced 8% more sales.
In Baymard’s tests on small direct-to-consumer sites, every tester began by browsing the menu and only 15% even looked for search. The study says search grows in importance as the catalog grows, from roughly 20 products up.
Read this part too
None of these studies tested Searchmaker or any local-index search plugin, and no Searchmaker store has a conversion measurement yet.
Most studies here measure how fast a page loads. Google’s 2009 test is about delays in Google’s own search results. Neither is the time a shop’s live search takes to answer.
Baymard’s 56% is a user-experience quality score of 170+ leading sites and apps. It is not a measure of sales, and it is not about WooCommerce.
People who use search already know what they want. Constructor’s numbers are a correlation, not proof that improving search lifts sales.
WooCommerce’s weak mobile Largest Contentful Paint is mostly front-end weight: themes, images, scripts. Searchmaker works on search, filters and feeds. It does not fix LCP.
What we measured ourselves
These come from our benchmarks. They are different layers, so we never compare one with another.
The theme’s live search took about 1.4 s per search, round trip. Searchmaker’s engine answered in single-digit milliseconds. Different layers, so no ratio. One store, our test.
Filtered queries in well under a millisecond of engine time, with no web server and no WordPress. Not a page-load time.
Full index build in about 6 s, and a Google Merchant feed of 240,000 per-variation items in about 6 s. Not measured on a real WooCommerce database or a slow host.
Try the in-browser demo, then check the numbers yourself. The 30-day money-back guarantee covers the rest.