wordpress search plugins

A re you looking for WordPress search plugins to improve your site search? Keep reading to find the best site search plugin for your WordPress blog. 

When you start a blog, you’ll want visitors to be able to easily search your site to find the content they’re looking for. 

But, the default WordPress search feature is quite limited and it doesn’t always work properly. 

That’s why you need a WordPress search plugin to improve the site search and help people discover relevant content. 

To help you find the best solution for your needs, we’ll go over the best WordPress search plugins on the market. 

First, let’s go into more detail about why you need a WordPress search plugin. 

Benefits of WordPress Search Plugins

As we mentioned earlier, the built-in WordPress search feature is limited and it doesn’t always work like it should. This makes it hard for visitors to find the content they’re looking for. 

This isn’t a big issue if your blog is new and you’ve only published a few articles. 

But, as your site grows and you have tons of published blog posts, you’ll want visitors to quickly find the relevant content they need. 

While you can apply blog SEO best practices to help people find your content in search engines, that doesn’t help the people that are already on your site

With a WordPress search plugin, visitors to your site can type a couple of keywords into the search bar and get accurate results instantly. 

wordpress search plugin example

This can help people find older articles that they forgot to bookmark or find resources related to a question they have. 

If you have an online store, it can also help visitors find a specific product. 

Improving your site search will help you create a better user experience, keep people on your website longer, and boost engagement. All of which can lead to higher conversions and sales. 

Now that you know why better site search is so important, let’s dive into this list of the best WordPress search plugins. 

1. SearchWP

SearchWP is the best custom search plugin for WordPress. With this powerful site search plugin, you can instantly improve WordPress search, with no coding required. 

SearchWP is easy to set up and use. As soon as you install and activate the plugin, it automatically indexes your content and replaces the default WordPress search. 

To give your visitors more accurate search results, the plugin searches and scans posts, pages, custom post types, categories, tags, excerpts, taxonomies, comments, advanced custom fields, and more. 

It even searches and scans PDF, Office, and text documents in your WordPress Media library. 

You can also easily customize how search results are ranked and prioritized using the weighing system. Simply assign a weight from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) to each content type. 

SearchWP integrates with all popular WordPress themes, custom themes, and page builder plugins. This ensures that your search form and results template always look great. 

Here are the key features of SearchWP:
  • Easy to set up and use
  • Searches everything including product details, shortcodes, custom post types, and more
  • Use keyword stems instead of exact term matches
  • Easy algorithm customization
  • Ability to exclude content from results
  • View search statistics and insights
  • Integrates with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads
  • And more…
Get SearchWP today!

Pricing: Starts at $99/year. 

2. ElasticPress

ElasticPress is a hosting service for WordPress search. Instead of running directly on your website, it runs the search queries in the cloud, which gives you super-fast search results. 

With ElasticPress, you can search custom post types, categories, metadata, and much more. 

You can also easily customize the search results using the Weighting Engine and Custom Results Editor right from your site’s dashboard. 

ElasticPress integrates with almost any type of WordPress website as well as top WordPress hosting providers.

It also seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce to add faceted product browsing to your site. This allows visitors to use product features to refine their search results. For example, users can filter search results by product color, size, availability, etc. 

Take a look at these features of ElasticPress:
  • Secure Autosuggest results
  • Adjustable results algorithm
  • Customize search terms to return your most popular content
  • Add faceted product browsing for WooCommerce
  • Display related posts
  • And more…
Get ElasticPress today!

Pricing: Starts at $79/month. 

3. Ivory Search

Ivory Search is the best free search plugin for WordPress. You can use the Ivory Search plugin to replace the default WordPress search as well as create new custom search forms. 

You can create as many custom search forms as you want and you can configure each search form to perform different types of searches. 

Using shortcode, you can display your custom search forms anywhere on your site including the header, footer, sidebar, navigation menu, pages, posts, widget-ready areas, and more. 

Ivory Search also offers Ajax search so you can show live search results as users type characters into the search bar. 

Check out these important features of Ivory Search:
  • Create an unlimited number of search forms
  • Configure and customize each search form separately
  • Search WooCommerce products, images, files, attachments, and more
  • Track searches in search analytics
  • Exclude specific content from search results
  • And more…
Get Ivory Search today!

Pricing: Ivory Search is a free plugin. There’s also a premium version that starts at $19.99/year. 

4. SearchWP Live Ajax Search

SearchWP Live Ajax Search is a free addon plugin for SearchWP. It works best with SearchWP but will also work with any search form that uses the built-in WordPress template tags to display search forms. 

This plugin enables Ajax-powered live search for your search forms. This means that users will be able to see search results as soon as they start typing text into the search bar. 

It comes with a widget that allows you to insert search forms anywhere on your site. 

It also works with any WordPress theme and comes with advanced customization options for developers. 

Here are the key features of SearchWP Live Ajax Search:
  • Enable Ajax live search on any search form
  • Use the WordPress widget to display search forms anywhere
  • Customization options for advanced users
  • Integrates with any WordPress theme
  • And more…
Get SearchWP Live Ajax Search today!

Pricing: Free. 

5. FiboSearch

FiboSearch is a popular, free Ajax search plugin for WooCommerce. It lets users get live search suggestions using Ajax without reloading the page. 

With this WordPress search plugin, you can search product SKUs, product titles, long and short descriptions, product categories, tags, and more. 

You can easily add search forms anywhere in your theme including on product pages and product categories. 

There’s also a cool feature that displays an ‘Add to Cart’ button when a user hovers over a live search suggestion. 

Take a look at these FiboSearch features:
  • Search by product SKU, product title, and long and short descriptions
  • Show product image, price, and other details in live search results
  • Ability to limit displayed suggestions
  • Group instant search results by type
  • Support for WooCommerce search results page and Google Analytics
  • And more…
Get FiboSearch today!

Pricing: FiboSearch is free. There’s also a premium version that starts at $49/year. 

6. WOOF Products Filter for WooCommerce

WOOF Products Filter for WooCommerce is another free WordPress search plugin for online stores. 

Using this plugin, your website visitors can filter products by categories, attributes, product tags, product custom taxonomies, and price. 

You can use a shortcode or widget to display the product filter in any part of your WordPress site. 

There’s also a product searching by Ajax option that allows users to filter WooCommerce products without reloading the page. 

Check out these top features of WOOF:
  • Search products by SKU, price, title, and more
  • Display product counts in search results
  • Allow customers to subscribe to product filter combinations
  • Infinite scrolling for user experience
  • Detailed search data and statistics
  • And more…
Get WOOF today!

Pricing: The plugin is free. You can also purchase a premium version for $39. 

7. Relevanssi

Relevanssi is another popular WordPress search plugin. You can use it to replace the standard WordPress search with a better search engine that has more accurate results. 

With Relevanssi, users can search comments, tags, categories, custom fields, user profiles, PDF content, and more. 

There’s also a fuzzy matching feature that allows the search to match partial words if complete words don’t match. 

Be aware that Relevanssi may require large amounts of database space and it has compatibility issues with some popular page builder plugins. 

Here are the key features of Relevanssi:
  • Easy to use with minimal setup configurations
  • Search results are sorted in the order of relevance, not by date
  • Highlight search terms when users click through search results
  • Adjust the weighting for titles, tags, and comments
  • Keep a log of popular and recent search queries
  • And more…
Get Relevanssi today!

Pricing: Free. You can also upgrade to a premium version for $99/year. 

8. WP Extended Search

WP Extended Search is a lightweight yet powerful WordPress search plugin that’s free and easy to use. It simply extends the default WordPress search. 

You can search in post meta, author names, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and more. 

Aside from customizing the default WordPress search, you can also create multiple search settings and assign them to custom search forms. You can display the custom search forms using a shortcode or a WordPress widget. 

Check out these important features of WP Extended Search:
  • Create unlimited search settings for custom search forms
  • Exclude old content from search results
  • Customize the order of search results
  • Choose the number of posts to display in search results
  • Integrates with WooCommerce to search SKUs
  • And more…
Get WP Extended Search today!

Pricing: This plugin is free. 

9. Better Search

Better Search replaces the default WordPress search to give search results that are relevant to the title and content of the post. 

You can fine-tune the search results by assigning a greater weight to either the title or the content. 

Aside from blog post titles and content, it can also search pages, custom post types, excerpts, meta fields, authors, tags, comments, and more. 

You can also find out what visitors are searching for on your site. Then, you can display a list of the most popular searches on your blog in the form of a heatmap. 

Here are Better Search’s top features:
  • Seamless integration with most WordPress themes
  • Search results are automatically sorted by relevance
  • Supports caching plugins like WP Super Cache
  • Add a profanity filter and customize the list of stop words
  • And more…
Get Better Search today!

Pricing: Free. 

What is the Best Search Plugin for WordPress?

With that, we’ve come to the end of this list of the best WordPress search plugins. After reviewing all of the options, we think the best option is SearchWP. 

SearchWP is easy to use and it comes with a ton of customization options to create more powerful and accurate search forms. 

searchwp best wordpress search plugin

Plus, it integrates with all popular WordPress themes as well as plugins like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. That means that you can use SearchWP whether you have a blog, an online store, or any other type of website. 

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress search plugin for your needs. 

If you liked this post, you might want to check out our list of the best SEO plugins. These tools will help you optimize your blog for search engines and increase blog traffic.

And don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter for more helpful blogging tips! 

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