10 Best WordPress Search Plugins for 2022 (Mostly Free)

Are you in search of the best WordPress search plugin for your website? Then, you are in the right place.

The default WordPress search feature is limited. It has a generic look and lacks speed and flexibility. Fortunately, there’s a plethora of options of amazing search plugins for WordPress that offers a great search system for your website.

Thus, in this article, we’ll list the top search plugins for WordPress. But before anything else, let’s know why you should use the WordPress search plugin. 

Why Use WordPress Search Plugin?

Having a functioning search system is integral for a successful website. It doesn’t matter if you’re running a blog, online store, business site, or anything else. Your website needs to have a way for visitors to find the content they’re looking for. 

Without a good search system in place, you’re inevitably going to push many of your visitors away. This significantly impacts your site’s bounce rate and consequently, the SEO.  

Hence, you need to use the best WordPress search plugin designed to help out in that case.


What to Look for in a WordPress Search Plugin?

If you’re confused about what features to look for in the WordPress custom search plugin, then here are some features that you must consider.

  • Fast and Accurate Search: Making your visitors wait too long is a surefire way to drive them away from your site. Thus, choose a good search plugin that ensures the search is fast enough.
  • Visible Search Bar: It’s extremely important that your search bar is clear and easily distinguishable to your visitors.
  • Phrase Searching: It’s essential that your search system is able to effectively search for phrases so that visitors can narrow down their search results. As a result, users will have an easier time finding what they’re looking for.
  • Effective Sorting and Filters: Sorting and filters can be of great help when it comes to narrowing down the search results. And, when they’re well-designed, they also provide a way for users to engage with your site.
  • Clear and Concise Search Results: Visitors must be served with clear and easy-to-parse search results. All the relevant information about the product for online stores should also be visible.
  • Search Logs: You can gain a better understanding of your visitors if you know what they search for. So, search logs are much more useful than you might have thought.

Now without further ado, let’s go through our list of the best premium and free WordPress search plugins.


10 Best WordPress Search Plugins for 2022

1. Ivory Search

Ivory Search Top WordPress Search Plugin

Ivory Search is a highly versatile and fantastic search plugin for WordPress that enables you to create your own custom search form. You’ll be able to create an unlimited number of search forms and configure each of them individually to suit your needs. 

The plugin also allows you to display the custom search forms on different parts of your site, including the header, footer, sidebar, widget area, posts, pages, and more. Ivory Search provides you with a large degree of control when it comes to searching for items. You can search for specific content through post titles, content, excerpt, etc. 

Further, it even allows you to search for content based on whether or not it has been password protected. Despite a large number of options available, Ivory Search is quite intuitive.

Key Features:

  • Unlimited custom forms creation
  • Configure each search form separately
  • Search files, images, and attachments 
  • Exclude specific content from search results
  • Multilingual search support
  • Integration with popular WordPress plugins (WooCommerce, bbPress, etc.)

Price: Free or $19.99/year for 1 Site


2. Advanced Woo Search 

Advanced Woo Search

A powerful WordPress search plugin, Advanced Woo Search is designed specifically for WooCommerce-powered websites. With this plugin, your visitors will be able to effectively search through all of your products. You can simply use a shortcode or a widget to place a search box wherever you want. 

Advanced Woo Search allows users to search in the product title, content, excerpt, categories, tags, as well as SKUs. Each search result can show the product image and price to help make things clear. It also utilizes Smart Ordering in order to show search results by the priority of the source where they were found.

Additionally, Advanced Woo Search is also compatible with plugins such as WPML, Polylang, WooCommerce Multilingual, and qTranslate to make translation easier.

Key Features:

  • User-friendly page settings
  • Product image and price
  • Google Analytics support
  • Compatible with popular page builder plugins 
  • Automatic synchronization of all product data
  • Support for WPML multi-currency

Price: Free or $59/year for 1 Site


3. Ajax Search Lite 

Ajax Search Lite Search Plugin for WordPress

Ajax Search Lite is a highly responsive live search plugin for your WordPress site. Using this plugin, you’ll be able to include an AJAX-powered search form on your site. The search is also designed to be extremely user-friendly, with a clean interface, mobile support, and smooth animations. 

The plugin not only enables your visitors to search in posts and pages but also lets them search in custom post types, custom fields, excerpts, categories, and more. Ajax Search Lite also features custom filter boxes (checkbox filters) for different categories and post types. 

You can even integrate Google Analytics to understand your customers better. You get all these top-notch features with the free version itself. However, you can opt into its premium version for more advanced features like 100+ customizable themes, 400+ admin options, advanced caching, etc. 

Key Features:

  • Fully Ajax powered
  • Vectorized and retina-ready SVG and CSS3 icons
  • 8 built-in templates
  • Image caching for fast speed
  • Frontend search setting boxes
  • WPML and Qtranslate compatible

Price: Free or $36 (Single payment)


4. Relevanssi

Relevanssi Best WordPress Search Plugin

If you’re looking for a feature-rich and configurable search engine to replace your default WordPress search, check out Relevanssi. This plugin is quite powerful and allows for fuzzy matching (matching of partial words in case the complete word doesn’t match) and phrase searching. 

To make things easier for the visitors, the plugin even highlights the searched term among the search results. Further, you can engage your visitors with “Did you mean?” styled suggestions just as in Google, based on successful searches.

For larger databases, Relevanssi also offers an option of using Search Result Throttling to improve performance. Besides, you can also use a simple filter hook to disable the indexing of certain content. 

Key Features:

  • Displays most popular or recent queries 
  • Lets you set the weight of titles, tags, and comments
  • Advanced filtering option
  • Index custom taxonomies, post types, contents of shortcodes, etc. 
  • bbPress support
  • Gutenberg friendly

Price: Free or $109/year for Unlimited sites


5. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search

Looking for a powerful search tool for your WooCommerce site to allow your users to find the products they need quickly? Then, YITH WooCommerce is the right choice. This plugin integrates the effective search engine to your online store and lets your customers search and get results instantly without loading the page

With YITH WooCommerce, you can improve the user experience of the shop by extending the product search using tags, categories, and SKUs. Besides, you can even display a short product description or even highlight promotional products by adding customizable labels to emphasize discounts. 

Not to mention, you can choose from two different layouts to show the search form. And as the plugin is WPML compatible, you can also easily translate it into any language of your choice.

Key Features:

  • Widgets and shortcodes to display search forms anywhere on your WooCommerce site
  • Show product image and choose its position
  • Display product price
  • Customizable sale badge
  • Show product preview
  • Search product by vendor by using the product in combination with YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor

Price: Free or € 69.99/year


6. FiboSearch

FiboSearch WordPress Search Plugin

Do you want to replace the default WooCommerce search with an advanced Ajax search bar with live search suggestions? Look no further, FiboSearch is one of the best WooCommerce product search plugins for this purpose. 

This search filter WordPress plugin is exclusively designed to help users save time and make online shopping easier to encourage more sales. It enables you to display product images, prices, descriptions, as well as SKUs in live search results. 

Additionally, it also features a unique mobile search mode to deliver your visitors a better user experience. What’s more? You can even limit the number for displaying suggestions. Further, customizing the minimum number of characters to display suggestions is also possible. 

Key Features:

  • Allows personalization of search bar and autocomplete suggestion
  • Easy integration with the WordPress themes
  • Smart algorithm to ensure the accurate display of results
  • WooCommerce search results page support
  • Supports Google Analytics
  • More features with pro-version of the plugin

Price: Free or $49/year for 1 Site


7. Search & Filter

Search & Filter Search Filter WordPress Plugin

Search & Filter is a simple WordPress searching and filtering plugin, just as its name. It’s an advancement of the WordPress search box that allows you to use the filtering system for your posts/pages to fine-tune your searches. 

You can display the fields as checkboxes, dropdowns, radio buttons, etc. Moreover, it’s possible to create as many fields and different search forms as you need. And you can place them anywhere on your site using shortcodes and widgets. 

Search & Filter is extremely easy to use and it’s suitable for different site niches like blogs, review sites, news sites, property sites, etc. The plugin is also useful for your online shop as it’s tested and compatible with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, etc. 

Key Features:

  • Ajax results display – no page reloading 
  • Drag and drop editor
  • Date Pickers and Auto-complete combo boxes for selects and multi-selects
  • Order Results Fields to enable users to order results author, title, name, etc. 
  • Works perfectly with WPML
  • Dedicated and friendly support

Price: Free 


8. WOOF – Products Filter for WooCommerce

WOOF Products Filter for WooCommerce

If you own a WooCommerce-powered online store, Products Filter for WooCommerce is a must-have search filter WordPress plugin for your site. Using this plugin, your customers can quickly find the products they’re searching for as they can filter products by categories, attributes, price, etc. 

Also, the Quick Search technology of this plugin lets your users do instant searches without reloading pages. Of course, you can also analyze the search results to gain insight into the interest of your customers as well.

Above all, if you’re a PHP developer, you can even use a WOOF API and default extensions to customize your search forms at your convenience. All in all, Products Filter for WooCommerce is an essential search plugin for your eCommerce site for maximum flexibility.

Key Features:

  • Perform products text search by title, excerpt, content, or combination
  • Display product taxonomies and attributes in the search form as radio, checkbox, dropdown, etc.
  • Step-by-step products filter option
  • Ajax product searching
  • Saver of Search Query to let logged-in users save search queries as favorites
  • Infinite product scrolling for improved user experience

Price: Free


9. WP Extended Search

WP Extended Search

WP Extended Search is a lightweight and powerful search plugin for WordPress. The plugin is easy to install and has intuitive search settings to change the built-in WordPress search query. Using this plugin, you can customize the default search behavior directly from the admin settings. 

The plugin empowers you to configure multiple search settings to your custom search forms. You can effortlessly customize the number of posts to show on your search result pages along with an order of search results.

Besides, it even gives you full flexibility to control whether to match search queries fully or partially. And it’s super-easy to add the search forms using a widget, shortcode, or PHP function. Not to mention, it also works with custom searchform.php. 

Key Features:

  • Smooth and simple search setting options
  • Create unlimited search settings
  • Option to exclude old content from the search results
  • Use widget, shortcode, and PHP function to add search forms
  • Option to include/exclude any public post types
  • WooCommerce compatibility

Price: Free


10. Better Search

Better Search Best WordPress Search Plugin

Better Search is a free WordPress plugin that will replace the built-in search form with a much-improved version. Not only does it improve search speed, but also provides users with more relevant answers. 

You can easily search through posts, pages, and even custom post types with this fantastic plugin. On top of that, Better Search also allows you to customize the output of the search in different ways. 

Advanced users can benefit even more from this plugin. It’s because there are a ton of filters and actions that can make this plugin even more useful. Hence, if you have coding knowledge, you can input your own CSS Styles to customize the plugin. 

Key Features:

  • Extremely easy to set up and use
  • Seamless integration with your WordPress theme
  • Enables tracking searches
  • Show a ‘search heatmap’ of popular searches
  • Supports WordPress cache plugins (WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache)
  • Translation ready

Price: Free


Conclusion

So, that was our list of the 10 best WordPress search plugins for your site. We’ve included both free and premium search plugins on our list. Thus, you can choose the right plugin according to your needs. 

We hope that our article was helpful to you. If yes, please do share this article in your friend circle as well. 

Also, if you’ve any comments let us know in the comment section below. 

While you’re here, why not check our other article on the best mobile responsive plugin for WordPress and the best AMP plugins?

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