Setting Up Facets, Filters, and Sorting

Configure facets and sort options so people can narrow results and find content quickly. You'll validate each change in Preview before you publish.

Prerequisites

Before you start, you'll need:

• A SearchStax Site Search account.
• A Search App with data already ingested.
• The fields you want to display already indexed. Use a connector, crawler, or API to index them.
• Index fields with values that work well for facets or sorting. Examples include categories, content types, dates, or prices.

Understand Facets (and When to Use Filters)

Generally, facets are visitor-facing categories that let people refine results. For example, a "Color" facet might let visitors filter results by "Red" or "Green". Facets come from values in your indexed fields and appear in the visitor-facing search UI.

Filters usually refer to rules that limit results further. In Site Search, these are called Data Filters. Data Filters are admin-defined include/exclude rules that silently restrict what a search can return. They don't appear in the visitor-facing UI.

Note: During onboarding you'll typically use a single Profile and won't need filters. If you later run multiple Profiles or need to restrict results globally, see Data Filters for more information.

For example: on a college site, make fields like department, degree level, and campus facets so visitors can refine results. Use a filter only if this profile should exclude internal pages (for example, faculty-only content) or limit results to a section of your site, like admissions.

Note: For more information about Drupal field machine names and how they map to SearchStax fields, see Understanding Drupal field names in SearchStax.

Add Facets

1. In Site Search, go to Configurations > Basic Configurations > Faceting.
2. Check Enable faceting.
3. From Facet field, select an index field. Enter a user‑friendly Label, set Max facet values, and choose Sort (Count or Alphanumeric). Click (+) to add it.
4. Select a facet and use Move up or Move down to change display order. Click X to remove a facet.
5. Click Save Draft, then Publish.

For time-based values (for example, months or days of the week), UI Kits implementations can display values in chronological order. For custom UI implementations, use beforeFacetsRender in your facets widget configuration.

If an expected field is missing, click the refresh icon next to Facet Field and try again.

When to Use Show More

When facet fields can have many values, such as sections or categories, add a Show more option in your search UI. This lets users see additional values beyond the initial list without overwhelming the default display.

Example: If a Department facet has 20 values, show the top 5 by default and add Show more so users can expand the full list when needed.

Tip: Set the initial visible count based on your UX and content volume, then let users expand when needed.

Define Sorting Options

1. Go to Configurations > Advanced Configurations > Sorting.
2. Check Enable sorting via a Dropdown Select.
3. Select a Sort field, choose Sort order (Ascending or Descending), add a user‑facing Label, then click (+) to add it to the list.
4. Use Move up or Move down to set the option order.
5. Click Save Draft, then Publish.

If a field is missing, click the refresh icon next to Sort Field to reload the schema.

Note: When your App has multiple Search Profiles, Sorting is a Profile-level feature. You can configure sort options independently for each profile or apply changes across multiple profiles using the "Save to Profile(s)" workflow. See Multi-Site Search Management for details.

Note: Sorting requires fields that hold a single value per document. Multi-valued fields are not reliable for sorting behavior. Use fields such as single-valued strings or dates for sort options.

Applying Sorting to Multiple Profiles

If your Search App has multiple Search Profiles, you can choose which profiles should use your sorting configuration:

1. After making changes to sorting, click Save Draft or Publish.
2. In the Select Profile(s) dropdown, choose which Search Profiles should receive your changes. You can select:
   • The current profile only
   • Multiple specific profiles
   • All profiles
3. Click Publish to apply the sorting configuration to the selected profiles.

Note: When you apply sorting changes to multiple profiles, the entire Sorting configuration is overwritten for the profiles you selected—not the specific field you changed. See Multi-Site Search Management for details about this workflow.

Validate Changes in Search Preview

1. In the top navigation, click Preview.
2. Run a broad query (for example, *). Test each facet and confirm counts update as you select values.
3. Use Sort by to verify that result order changes per your new options.

Tip: If you're testing a hosted UI or custom page, Publish first, then refresh that page. Preview shows only published configurations.

Data Filters During Onboarding

Many search setups use Data Filters to scope experiences by content type or audience. Keep initial filters simple, then refine them as you validate results.

What's Next

Next, tune the relevance of your results so the best content ranks higher.