Frequently Asked Questions

FacetWP requires PHP 5.6+ and WordPress 5.0+ (fully compatible with 5.8.3).

No, FacetWP is a plugin for self-hosted WordPress installs.

Yes, FacetWP fully supports PHP 8.x.

The minimum supported version is PHP 5.6. The PHP Stats page helps us determine when to drop support for older PHP versions.

We offer a free trial version, with the following limitations:

• A maximum of 2 facets will display on a page;
• A persistent admin notice will appear in the WP admin dashboard;
• We cannot provide any support.

No, we do not offer refunds. Please use our free trial to see if FacetWP is right for you.

See our Getting Started screencast. If the video doesn’t make sense to you, then you’ll probably need to find a developer to assist you.

We do not current offer paid implementation services. For custom development (site buildouts, design tweaks, other customizations) we recommend Codeable.io.

Probably. There’s tens of thousands of themes out there. Tell us which theme, and we’ll try to figure out whether the theme is compatible.

FacetWP integrates with Elementor and Beaver Builder.

FacetWP does not officially integrate with Divi, WP Bakery, or Oxygen Builder. Your mileage may vary, but it’s not something we support.

On these non-supported builders, you could always try to use FacetWP’s built-in Listing Builder for the actual result listing 🙂

Yes! FacetWP supports any plugin that uses post types to store products. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and Jigoshop are all compatible.

One caveat: some page components (e.g. pagination and sorting) may need to be replaced with FacetWP facets for paging and sorting.

Yes! Professional licenses include the User Post Type plugin, allowing you to map users to a post type, and therefore filter users 🙂

FacetWP can be installed on sub-sites in a WordPress multi-site network setup. But FacetWP cannot filter across different sites.

Please also remember that each sub-site counts against your license’s site limit.

Yes, automatic updates are enabled for sites with an active license key.

FacetWP will continue to work, but you will no longer receive plugin updates or support.

We offer a 20% renewal discount on the normal price.

Make sure that you’ve activated your license (Settings > FacetWP > Settings). If you’re still not seeing updates, go to Dashboard > Updates, then click the Check again button. Sometimes WP’s update cache need to be flushed.

If using the CSS-based template approach, make sure that your facet shortcodes are *outside* of the facetwp-template container element.

• Have you hit the “Re-index” button?
• Does a valid template exist on your page?
• Is your post type searchable (exclude_from_search = false)?
• Are there any javascript errors in your browser’s console?
• Turn on Debug Mode and make sure that FacetWP is using the right query.
• For some custom fields — like Pods relationship fields or serialized data — you may need to tell FacetWP’s indexer how to properly index the data.

FacetWP itself is exceedingly fast. It normally takes a fraction of a second to load results. However, every WordPress request (including AJAX) is only as fast as the slowest plugin.

AJAX requests are ignored by most caching plugins, so the load time you’re seeing with FacetWP is your server’s true speed.

If FacetWP takes a while to load, there’s likely a larger underlying issue. Make sure to disable any unnecessary plugins, and ensure that your server has sufficient resources.

We have a free Caching add-on that may help on high-traffic sites. Please read the installation instructions carefully, since it requires a few extra steps.

Some plugins and themes use JavaScript to modify the layout, load images, or apply animation effects. Some examples include masonry layouts, isotope, image lazy loading, and sliders. These scripts run on page load, but do not usually run after each FacetWP ajax refresh, meaning that they’ll likely need to be manually re-triggered within a facetwp-loaded event.

If you’re using a caching plugin like WP Rocket, make sure that HTML minification and script deferring is disabled.

FacetWP’s indexer includes built-in resume functionality (learn more). It should resume automatically after a minute or two, assuming you keep a browser tab open.

If your site is behind a .htpasswd login, the indexer might be blocked from resuming. In these cases, you’ll need to pass the access credentials to FacetWP.

If your site is hosted on WP Engine, try adding the following line to wp-config.php:

define( 'WPE_GOVERNOR', false );

FacetWP was built with performance in mind. We’ve structured our data storage and have analyzed every query to make sure that it runs as efficiently as possible.

Ultimately, the speeds depends on your server, site setup, and amount of content. If your server is overloaded (i.e. too many heavy plugins) or underpowered, then obviously FacetWP won’t run at its peak. Other factors include:

• the total number of results in your listing
• the listing display itself (how efficient is the display of each result)
• the number of active facets on the page
• the facet types in use

We are occasionally asked whether FacetWP supports pretty URLs, e.g. /make/audi/model/a4/ instead of ?_make=audi&_model=a4.

FacetWP only supports GET-based permalinks. “Pretty” permalinks quickly lose their appeal as more selections are made. Plus it may actually be bad for SEO, since search engines would see a bunch of different URLs with the same content.

That’s probably why most large eCommerce sites stick with GET-based permalinks 🙂

We use prefixes to prevent conflicts with WordPress and other plugins. WordPress has many reserved query vars, and strange things happen if FacetWP tries to use them.