No, you do not need to rebuild your site
Changing a shop’s search engine sounds like a project: a new theme, templates to redo, a quarter of the year. We re-read the code of our three connectors to see what they actually require of a shop. Here is what changes on your side, what your theme has to carry, and what happens when the engine does not answer.
What changes in your shop
Our own measurement: the code of the three connectors re-read on 21 October 2026 — their code, not their documentation. Not one of the three rewrites a single page of your shop, and not one creates a table in your database. Your product cards, your fonts, your product pages and your filters stay exactly what they are: what gets installed plugs in alongside, and comes out the same way.
What differs between the three is the move you are asked to make.
| Shop | What gets added, and where | What fills your catalogue |
|---|---|---|
| PrestaShop | a module, installed from your back office | nothing: your catalogue arrives through a separate import |
| WooCommerce | a plugin, installed from your back office | the plugin, in batches of a hundred products |
| Shopify | an app, then a block you place in your theme | the app, on its own |
On PrestaShop the shop asks the engine for a list of identifiers and rebuilds its own product cards, filters, pagination and sort options: nothing the visitor sees is produced by us. On WooCommerce the final request sent to your database is identical, character for character, to the one before — measured on the same page and the same address. Only the order of the products changes.
What your theme has to carry
On PrestaShop and on WooCommerce: nothing. Your theme keeps its cards, its fonts and its filters, and it never has to know the engine changed.
On Shopify there is one condition, and it is real: the block goes into a recent theme, one of those where you drop an element from the editor. An older generation of theme cannot take it. Read on 8 September 2026 on Shopify’s reference theme: three of its sections accept an app block, the header and the footer among them. If your theme is old, that is the only thing to sort out, and it does not depend on us.
If the engine does not answer
This is the question that decides, because a shop without search does not sell. All three connectors hand back, each in its own way.
PrestaShop. The very search that discovers the outage is passed to the shop’s original search, within the same second: the visitor gets results, not an empty page. So do the following ones, for sixty seconds, before a fresh attempt.
WooCommerce. After two failures the plugin stops calling for sixty seconds and lets the original search serve. It does not wait forever either: three seconds by default, and that is a setting you can change.
Shopify. The block sends the visitor to your own shop’s search page, whose address is written into the block when you install it.
This behaviour is the default, not an option to hunt for: the fallback is on from installation, and you have to switch it off on purpose.
What the code does not do for you
This is where the three differ, and saying so here avoids a bad surprise.
On Shopify the app fetches your catalogue itself, with no action from you. On WooCommerce the plugin sends it from your site, in batches of a hundred products, and you follow the progress from its settings screen — the measured limits of that plugin are in the article that publishes them.
On PrestaShop the module sends nothing. Re-read on 21 October: it builds only two addresses, and both are reads. There is no write path to the catalogue at all. This is not a fault, it is a deliberate absence, written into the module. Your catalogue therefore arrives another way, through a file or from your account area, and the getting-started guide describes both. What PrestaShop’s original search does and does not do is measured separately.
And if you want no connector at all
Some shops have no theme to preserve: the site calls the engine directly and shows the results in its own pages. That is another trade and another budget, and it is described in the article on search without a theme. The question asked here is the opposite one: keeping the site as it is.
Why change engine at all, and at what catalogue size the original search gives up, is a further question again — it is measured here.
What we have not measured
How long it takes you. Nobody has timed it at a merchant’s, so we have no figure to give and we will not invent one.
What is checked, on the other hand, is that the module runs where you are: on 20 September 2026 it was replayed on five different PrestaShop installations, from 8.0 to 9.1, with 121 checks green on each. That says nothing about your shop in particular, and that is why the trial is free.