These days, having a well-functioning search system is an essential part of a website. No matter if you manage a blog, commercial, or business web source, people visiting it should have a way to find the information they are looking for. Yet, it is not enough to only get a search system for the site — way more important is to design it so that it doesn’t repel visitors.
A well-designed search has a dramatic effect on your website bounce rate and SEO. And while default WordPress search function is far from good, tons of third-party WP search plugins come to the rescue.
The plugin, properly chosen, can make the website search fast, accurate, and more engaging. And if you are looking for that plugin right now, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we are going to cover the best free and paid WordPress search engine plugins designed to improve the website browsing experience for your visitors. But, before getting to the overview, let’s consider things that make a good search engine.
Now that you know what a good search system looks like, it’s high time to take a look at the best WordPress search engine plugins.
SearchWP is a premium WordPress searchable database plugin with an extended set of features and an intuitive user interface. The add-on ensures a straightforward and quick setup, so you can simply install and activate it with just a few clicks. With SearchWP implemented to the website, you let the visitors search through any part of the site comprising documents, custom field data, eCommerce products, and other content.
Another good thing about the plugin is that it enables search algorithms customization and provides for smooth integration with WooCommerce, bbPress, and Easy Digital Downloads. Generally, a good selection of features and a user-friendly interface makes SearchWP worth your attention.
Most Popular Features:
Pricing: Standard — $99; Pro — $149; Pro Plus — $299 (depending on license volume)
Another search plugin popular with WordPress users is Ajax Search Pro. Because the add-on runs on Ajax, it starts returning search results as soon as visitors type in the keywords, without reloading the page. This only adds to its appeal when it comes to user experience. Ajax Search Pro comes with multiple customization options including over 60 customizable themes, Retina-ready graphics, numerous layouts for search results, etc.
This add-on has many other awesome features aimed at making the website search better.
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Pricing: Lifetime update and 6-month support for $36
Like many other WordPress search plugins in this list, Swiftype Site Search also comes fully customizable, versatile, and feature-rich. Add-on installation doesn’t require any coding knowledge, whereas an intuitive dashboard provides for fast customization using all the necessary tools available at hand. With Swiftype Site Search, you can easily create an effective and engaging search system on your website. These and other top features make the plugin one of the best in class.
Most Popular Features:
Pricing: Free for up to 50 search result customizations, single website installation, and Swiftype branding; App Search — from $49/month; Site Search — from $79/month
When it comes to replacing default WordPress search, Relevanssi may come in handy. This is a great solution for everyone who wants to take full control over the website search system. You can use filters, go with fuzzy matching and search by phrases, or even assign weights to tags, titles, or comments. Among other things, Relevanssi highlights search words in previous search results and provides for implementing suggestions in “Did you mean?” style which lets visitors enjoy their browsing experience. On the whole, the plugin is found to be powerful enough due to its extensive set of features.
Most Popular Features:
Pricing: Free; Annual — $99; Permanent — $349
Better Search WordPress plugin is available for free download. Intentionally designed to replace the default WP search, it consequently comes equipped with more advanced features for better speed and more relevant search results. Website visitors will be able to search through pages, posts, and custom post types to find everything they are looking for way faster. The other outstanding thing about Better Search is that it allows you to customize the output, as well as configuring results by setting the weight of title and content.
The plugin in its default mode can be seamlessly integrated with your WordPress theme, whereas advanced users have a chance to leverage extra templates, filters, and actions. For more features, consider the list below.
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Pricing: Free
Ajax Search Lite is a free live search add-on for WordPress powered by Ajax. This is a truly distinctive plugin designed for WP users. It comes with a responsive, clean, user-friendly, and mobile-ready interface, smooth animations, and other features. This plugin, applied to your website, lets visitors search through pages, posts, custom post types, categories, excerpts, descriptions, custom fields, etc. Ajax Search Lite is a feature-rich plugin aimed at replacing the default WordPress search for better appearance and search results.
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Pricing: Free
As soon as you decide to enhance the default WordPress search system, Ivory Search is the plugin to consider. Despite the advanced features the plugin provides, it remains extremely versatile and user-friendly. Not only does it allow establishing custom search forms, but the add-on also lets you create an infinite number of those forms and fine-tune them according to your needs. You can display them wherever you want on the site, be it a header, footer, sidebar, or pages, posts, and widget areas.
As you can see, the WordPress add-on gives you full control over your website search engine, whereas an extensive set of features provides for better performance.
Most Popular Features:
Pricing: Starter — free; Pro — $19.99/year; Pro Plus — $49.99/year
From the very name of the plugin, it is clear that Advanced Woo Search is designed to serve WooCommerce-powered websites. So, applying this distinctive search add-on to your store will let your prospective customers find the needed products with no hassle. They can search through categories, content, product title, excerpts, tags, and SKUs and get the result shown with image and price. Designed with users in mind, Advanced Woo Search comes easy to use, fast, and feature-rich which makes it the best WooCommerce search plugin.
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Pricing: Free
ACF: Better Search is a great solution to improve the performance of the default WordPress search engine. This simple yet effective plugin is designed to greatly enhance the website visitors’ search experience. But still, to ensure the add-on works properly, enable and activate Advanced Custom Fields plugin. When everything is properly set up, web users can search by text, email, text area, number, URL, and more.
ACF: Better Search is feature-rich, yet easy to use and understand which makes it more attractive to WordPress users in comparison with many other plugins.
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Pricing: Free
Site Search 360 is a feature-rich and easy to install a search engine plugin designed to work with any website. It is in high demand among everyone looking for a polished and user-friendly add-on. After implementation, you get an opportunity to configure the look and functionality of the search bar, enhance content visibility, and learn the intention behind every search query by leveraging analytics tools. Although the Site Search 360 plugin looks great right out of the box, you can still apply minor adjustments to make it fit your website design and structure. Go through the other features to find out why Site Search 360 is the one worth considering.
Most Popular Features:
Pricing: Free with limited features; Columbo — $9/month; Holmes — $39/month; Batman — $99/month
FacetWP is another WordPress searchable database plugin aimed at advanced filtering. Utilizing this add-on lets you add facet search to different types of content including shop archives, recipe pages, listings, resource pages, etc. Not only can it work with most themes, but it also allows for adding search and filter facets anywhere on the page by leveraging shortcodes. Inside the pack, you will find a great number of facet types comprising checkboxes, sliders, date ranges, dropdowns, etc.
Another good thing about FacetWp is its Ajax-powered nature which provides for fast filtering without reloading the page.
Most Popular Features:
Pricing: Basic — $99/year; Professional — $249/year
If your visitors are sick and tired of long loading of your website, if you want your website to work more properly, better, and faster, try using the Must-Have WordPress Plugins, literally the must-have plugins pack you need for such purposes. This set contains a few plugins that can help you to customize your website, will make the loading time quite shorter, will give you the possibility to see your visitors statistics, and more interesting things! So, let’s find out what plugins you get with this cool set!
What’s included:
These were the plugins you get with this cool Must-Have WordPress Plugins pack. Don’t wait too long and purchase this set because here we have collected all the useful plugins needed for the building of a great website and for its better functionality. We’ll install these plugins ourselves, typically it takes from 2 to 3 days. If you haven’t installed the template yet, we can help you with it for an extra $49. After checking how all these plugins work by us, you will have such an opportunity as free revision.
So, here’s our list of best free and paid WordPress search engine plugins. All of them come with multiple helpful features needed to create an effective and engaging search system right on the website. Every single add-on has the strengths that make them stand out among other similar plugins. Go through each of them to decide on the one that perfectly suits your needs and fits your budget.
Hopefully, this post was helpful for you. If you haven't found your favorite plugin in the list, feel free to leave a comment with the recommendation, and we will include it in our future blog posts.
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