Are you running a multilingual WordPress website? we published an article on the best translation plugins for multilingual websites and you can improve the user experience of your site visitors who contact you using the world’s best WordPress contact form plugin. Evidently, we’re interested in boosting your WordPress experience and today we’re back with another set of plugin recommendations.
WordPress installs with the basic setup required to run your business nicely but as you must know by now, there are 3rd party plugins that can boost its effectiveness and this is no different for the content management system’s default search.
Yes, it works to return a result of selected text in posts and pages but the WordPress search function can do a lot more complex things than that e.g. you can search for strings of texts in PDFs, you can filter search results for specific custom post types, etc.
If you’re interested in boosting your WordPress search functionality then today’s your lucky day because here are the best WordPress search plugins for your website listed in alphabetic order.
1. ACF: Better Search
ACF: Better Search is an advanced open-source search plugin created to compliment the popular Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin for WordPress websites. This means that it has the ability to search for content of selected fields without requiring any configuration code snippets. It is commended for its speed especially since its search engine was recently optimized to be ~75% faster.
2. Advanced Woo Search
Advanced Woo Search is is a powerful AJAX-powered live search plugin designed for WooCommerce. Its features include stop words for excluding certain words from search, variable products, product price, a settings page, shortcode and widgets, WPML multi-currency support, smart ordering, etc.
3. Ajax Search Lite
Ajax Search Lite is a live search plugin for WordPress created to boost the user experience with an Ajax-powered search form featuring several options such as frontend search settings boxes, image caching, google analytics integration, up to 8 built-in templates, etc.
4. Better Search
Better Search is an open-source search plugin designed with the aim of supercharging the search functionality of WordPress websites. Its features include seamless integration with all types of themes, customization, configurable search results, search results by relevance, a profanity filter, support for cache plugins, etc.
5. Category Wise Search
Category Wise Search is an open-source WordPress search plugin that allows you to search for category-specific content. Its features include searching default category, searching post-category-wise, excluding categories with children in the search category field, and excluding categories in the search category field.
6. Ivory Search
Ivory Search is an advanced WordPress search plugin designed to be easy to use especially for creating custom search forms. It supports an unlimited number of search forms with unique configurations, several display locations e.g. header, posts, etc. among other features such as support for multilingual search, AJAX search, searching for images, attachments, and files.
7. Relevanssi
Relevanssi is one of the most popular search plugins for WordPress websites with up to 100,000 active installations, several features, and a lot of configurable options to allow for better search results. Some of them include multisite friendliness, bbPress support, search for comments, tags, custom fields, fuzzy matching, etc.
8. Swiftype Search
Swiftype is an advanced WordPress search plugin with features such as reordering search results in the SERP using drag and drop, multi-language support, automatic updates, search analytics, search query autocomplete, and the ability to work efficiently on large scale sites with 10,000+ posts.
9. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search
Last but definitely not the least is the YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search plugin which was created to improve the overall performance of your website’s search using AJAX functionality. As the name suggests, it is also built to work exceptionally well with WooCommerce so be rest assure that your clients’ search experience will be enjoyable.
A handful of these plugins are open-source and absolutely free while others offer a premium model that you can purchase in order to access extra features. I advise that you find out a little bit more about which of these plugins better fits your business model; any of them you choose will do a good job.
Do you have note-worthy experiences with any of these plugins Or maybe your favorite one didn’t make it to the list? Feel free to drop your comments in the section below.
