If a product exists in the admin but customers cannot find it, work through these in order. It is very rarely a fault in the store software.
The obvious ones first
- Is the product enabled, and is it assigned to a category?
- Does it have stock, and is the store set to hide out-of-stock items?
- Is there a date restriction on it?
Then the caches
Shops cache aggressively. A product can be correct in the database and absent from the page because the page was built before the change. Clear the store cache from the admin and reload.
Then the search index
Search does not read your products directly; it reads an index built from them. If the index is out of step, products will be missing from search while appearing perfectly well elsewhere. Rebuilding the index from the store admin resolves this, and it is the correct fix – not something to be repaired at the server.
A rebuild can take a while on a large catalogue. Let it finish before judging the result.
If a rebuild does not fix it
Note whether the missing products have anything in common – a category, a supplier, a recently changed field. Items changed at the same time pointing at the same cause is far more useful to us than "search is broken". Open a ticket with a couple of example product codes.
