A search feature is essential for an excellent user experience on any website. It makes it easy for users to find the content that they are looking for. Easy search on a store reduces friction to sales!
WordPress comes with a standard search that offers basic functionality. It's perfect for simple websites or blogs. But when it comes to eCommerce websites, directory and listing sites, or websites with lots of information you will need a professional search plugin.
On CodeCanyon you will find powerful WordPress search plugins that will vastly improve your users experience.
Best-Selling WordPress Search Plugins on CodeCanyon
For a one-time fee you can grab one of these WordPress search plugins and make it easy to search and find anything visitors are looking for in your website.
1. Ajax Search Pro
If you're looking for a beautiful and efficient search engine, you won't go wrong with Ajax Search Pro, one of the most popular and powerful live search plugins for WordPress on CodeCanyon. It is highly customizable and has lots of options.
Features include auto-complete, keyword suggestion, keyword highlighting, checkbox, dropdown, radio buttons, category-tag-and taxonomy filters, custom fields and post meta filters.
You can also search the contents of media attachments, including PDF, CSV, text, and Office documents such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.
Here is a tutorial on how to add a live search bar to your WordPress website with the Ajax Search Pro plugin:
2. Product Filter for WooCommerce
Product Filter for WooCommerce is user-friendly and allows your customers to filter by any and all criteria to find exactly what they want on your website. It has AJAX support for seamless filtering.
Notable features include:
- unlimited layouts and display options
- customize filter terms, thumbnails, colors, checkbox layouts, and select boxes
- numerical range filters for prices and filters for taxonomies
- filter analytics to give you an insight into what your customers want
- sidebar and widget filter
It supports WPBakery Page Builder, Gutenberg, and WPML for translation.
3. Reactive Search Pro
What makes Reactive Search Pro unique is its map-based search with the built-in geo box and location search facility. It also has product search, image search, media search, comment search, review search, BuddyPress user search, and BuddyPress group search. In addition you can search all post types taxonomies, metadata and so on.
Other notable features include:
- drag-and-drop search page builder
- grid builder for search results
- map radius and location search
It is compatible with WooCommerce, WPML, and Grid Builder.
4.MDTF—Wordpress Meta Data and Taxonomies Filter
Consider MDTF if you want to make anything searchable. It makes your WordPress website content filterable and searchable by meta fields and taxonomies.
Notable features include:
- widgets and shortcodes
- filter posts and custom post types by meta fields
- filter posts and custom post types by taxonomies
- query multiple taxonomies and meta fields on the same time
5. Live Search and Custom Fields
This WordPress filter plugin provides a powerful live search and WooCommerce product filter functionality for your customers to filter and search products on your store or posts on your blog.
Features of this plugin include:
- AJAX search to perform a search in any LSCF custom field including multiple LSCF custom fields
- shortcodes to display custom fields in any page posts
6. Progress Map, List and Filter—WordPress Plugin
Progress Map, List and Filter is an extension of the Progress Map WordPress Plugin.
This list and filter plugin allows you to:
- switch the “Progress Map” carousel to a list
- explore listings by applying multiple filters
- filter using multiple taxonomy terms or multiple custom fields
- sort listings based on multiple orders
All actions are handled using AJAX. You can use default options “A to Z”, “Z to A” that come with the plugin or you can add unlimited custom options like “sort by price”, “sort by size”, etc.
7. PWF WooCommerce Product Filters
PWF WooCommerce Product Filters is a fast loading plugin that helps your customers find products in your shop fast. Shoppers can filter products by categories, taxonomies, attributes, tags, custom fields, price range, stock status, vendors, and so on.
It has many hooks and JavaScript trigger events, allowing for a high degree of customization to make the plugin compatible with any theme.
- drag-and-drop form builder
- WordPress multisite support
- unlimited filters
The plugin is compatible with WPML, WC Vendors Marketplace, and AJAX search for WooCommerce.
8. Filter Everything—WordPress and WooCommerce Product Filter
The Filter Everything plugin builds a professional filtering system for your WooCommerce products and post types. The plugin works on any page including those created by page builders like Elementor, WPBakery, Divi, Oxygen builder, and more.
In addition, the plugin supports any custom queries and it has unique SEO features that allow you to make filtering pages available for indexing by search engines and increase traffic from them.
9. Media Grid—Advanced Filters Add-on
This plugin is an addon for Media Grid. It adds unlimited filters to help search items in your grid. Customers can search items by single criteria, multiple options and also by numeric range.
Filters are composed by sections: each section may have an associated icon. Each section can be also integrated in the powerful Media Grid deeplinking system so your complex filters will be sharable.
But there’s more: this addon is natively integrated into WooCommerce and automatically turns attributes and product price into sections.
Free WordPress Search Plugins
These free plugins don't offer as many features as the premium WordPress search plugins on CodeCanyon, but if you're on a budget, they're a great way to get started enhancing your site search at no cost.
1. Ajax Search Lite
Ajax Search Lite replaces the default WordPress search with a better-looking, more efficient search engine. It supports custom post types and custom fields and more.
2. Relevanssi—A Better Search
Relevanssi replaces the standard WordPress search with a better search engine that offers search results sorted in the order of relevance, not by date. It has fuzzy matching to match partial words, if complete words don’t match.
3. FiboSearch–Ajax Search for WooCommerce
FiboSearch gives your users a very advanced AJAX search bar with live search suggestions. It provides advanced search with live suggestions.
4. Highlight Search Terms
This lightweight plugin highlights search terms within WordPress generated search results.
Things To Consider When Looking For A WordPress Search Plugin
1. Consider Search Speed
Searching takes up a lot of website resources in order to bring up results visitors are looking for. Because hundreds of queries happen simultaneously, it can significantly slowdown your website. So look for a search plugin that is optimized for speed.
2. Think About Scaling
Scalability is non-negotiable. As your business expands and handles high search volumes, the search plugin should be able to grow with it.
3. Search is not Just for Posts and Pages
To return complete results, a search plugin must be able to conduct a comprehensive search through wide range of tags, categories, paragraph texts, custom fields, taxonomies and more.
4. Put User Experience First
Look for user-friendly features that make it a breeze to do searches on your website therefore creating great user experience. Think about features like live search, auto-complete, search suggestions, and search query highlighting.
5. Choose a Payment or Subscription Model
Finding the right WordPress search plugin will also depend on your budget. You can choose between free, one-time fee, and monthly plans. The free and one-time fee options mean the search plugin makes use of WordPress resources on your back-end. While using the monthly plans means the search service is hosted on the cloud and all the heavy lifting is done away from your website.
6. Don't Forget Mobile!
The search plugin must be responsive and work properly on mobile devices and all modern browsers.
Find The Best WordPress Search Plugin for Your Website Now!
The best WordPress search plugins make it easy for your users to conduct searches on your website or blog. On CodeCanyon, you will find many WordPress search plugins that will vastly improve the search experience on your website.
Envato Tuts+ has many resources that will help you learn more about WordPress search plugins:
