WordPress is a great blogging platform, but when it comes to search functionality there are a lot of things that you might not be able to do with the native features.
Top WordPress search plugins are a necessary part of any website, especially if you have a lot of content. It’s important to always have the right plugin because it will save your time and headaches in the future.
In this blog post, I’m going to share a review of 10 different search widget plugins that I think are worth checking out. All of these plugins provide different ways for people to search your site and find what they’re looking for quickly and easily!
Top 10 Best WordPress Search Plugins
SearchWP
When it comes to any business and e-commerce website, this search plugin can greatly improve your WordPress site search functionality by adding some advanced search systems. It becomes impossible for the e-commerce site owner to go on with the built-in search engine in WordPress for its extreme simplicity and generic features.
That’s why a strong and well-capable third-party search plugin is required which will let the users effortlessly browse any product or service across the whole website. SearchWP is exactly what it matches.
This deeper-level search plugin can provide a professional-level user experience including high-level search features to your website like adding and setting up the search system without any touch of a single code, supportive to WooCommerce products, metadata, pdf, and many more.
The most notable feature is that it can spontaneously and intuitively integrate with your WordPress default search system. The standard license of this plugin is only $99.
Ivory Search
Ivory Search is one of the enhanced search plugins for WordPress websites that lets you create custom search forms. There is no limit to create and customize the search forms to your liking.
Most especially, you can configure them individually. To create dynamic search forms, it supports most of the WordPress multilingual plugins and WooCommerce. Ivory search can easily integrate with your WordPress site and gives away improved search results by looking deeply into different post-types, custom fields, images metadata, and so on.
This plugin allows you to display the search forms anywhere on your WordPress Website. There is a free version of Ivory Search with limited features. For an average user, the free version itself can be enough as it has many interesting features.
Besides, to enjoy a more professional experience, you better buy the premium one at $19.99 per year that offers a few more advanced options.
Relevanssi
It is an advanced featured search plugin for WordPress users that replaces the default search system and offers a new search engine. Relevanssi includes tons of different settings letting you configure your WordPress search method in any way that you prefer from admin tools in the WordPress dashboard.
Despite that, it stores the search results automatically and highlights the searched items on the content when a user looks for something through the search bar of Relevanssi.
The most advanced and notable feature of this plugin is that when you search for something, it lets you enjoy fuzzy matching. That means, if you search for a keyword that doesn’t exactly match with any content, the Relevanssi add-on will take you to the partial or related contents across the whole website.
Although it has a free version, the premium one at $99 per year and offers some more configurable options.
Better Search
Better search is a free and lightweight WordPress search plugin that replaces the built-in generic search engine of your website. This plugin allows a user to search any post across the website and helps to find some more relevant results matching with the title or the inside content of the post.
Besides, it has been packed up with lots of features and options to help you configure and customize the search outputs. Better Search includes seamless integration. Also, it integrates perfectly with any WordPress theme that doesn’t need custom search templates.
One of the added advantages of a better search is that all of the search results are tracked with a heat map. So whenever someone hits the search button, it brings the most popular search on the front.
It also uses filters and other options for more extended and improved search systems. Moreover, this plugin supports CSS that lets you add more style by coding.
WP Extended Search
It is another free and lightweight simple search plugin for WordPress sites. You can replace the default search system with the functionality and features of the search engine of your site.
Also, you can simply go to the plugin settings and include whatever options you want in the search bar. The user can search with the text content, author name, post-types, taxonomies, metadata, and some other miscellaneous settings.
Notably, you won’t have to add any widget and shortcode while using WP Extended Search. Few other features of this plugin include custom search forms, custom widgets, different search customizations, compatibility with WooCommerce, and so on.
As I said earlier, the WP Extended Search plugin is totally free of cost. It doesn’t have any pro version. So if you are looking for a free but advanced featured search plugin for your WordPress website, then this one can be a perfect match for you.
SearchIQ
It is one of the best Search plugins due to its fastest search results system. As the user types, it flashes out all the relevant results either matched with the contents partially or explicitly.
Besides, this plugin offers real-time analytics, therefore you can effortlessly optimize the strategy of the contents the way you like. The UI of SearchIQ is also customizable.
So if you want, you can filter out some specific content or specialize any content into the search results. It provides an easy inclusion and exclusion feature of the search results.
There are few widgets integrated with this plugin that offers the user to add any placeholder text or choose the post types.
There is a free version of SearchIQ that can provide everything you want a WordPress search plugin to be. Additionally, it has a pro version as well starting at $19 per month.
AJAX Search Lite
This plugin replaces the default search engine of WordPress and adds a live search bar on your WordPress website. The results from the AJAX search engine can be filtered based on different categories and types.
With multiple performance options, this plugin can integrate with Google analytics as well. There are 40 different options at the backend of AJAX search lite, which is an added feature of this plugin.
Most especially, it includes 8 built-in templates to get started. Moreover, this add-on lets the user add a title to the widget.
The other features of AJAX search lite are drag and drop builder advantage, 400 admin options, live search bar, category-wise post inclusions, highly compatible and responsive, frontend search settings boxes, and so forth.
The freee version offers some limited features. So for a more quality user experience, there is a pro version at only $36.
FiboSearch
This plugin provides a highly responsive AJAX search for Woocommerce. With advanced live search suggestions, FiboSearch is on the top catalog indeed. A user can effortlessly search with any product title, long keywords like short descriptions from the top search bar on the WordPress website.
Besides, using the admin panel, you can put the search widget anywhere on the website to ensure the user’s flexibility and quality experience. There is also an option that lets the site admin replace the search bars and adds the Fibo search bar on the top.
Experiencing lots of other configuration options like customizing search parameters, integration with Divi, fuzzy search with synonyms, google analytics, mobile search mode, and many more.
Although there is a free version of FiboSearch, the pro version includes quite advanced options. It starts with a plan of $49 per year.
Reactive Search Pro
Reactive search pro is a premium search plugin that comes with lots of advanced and unique features. The customizable search forms integrated with it are highly effective and easily adjustable.
Besides offering tons of different filter systems, this plugin makes sure a friendly and amazing user experience. If you are having an online store, directory websites, or any real-estate websites, Reactive Search Pro can be a perfect choice for you.
The drag and drop search system is surely one of the best features of this plugin. Using this option, you can easily customize and design the search forms on your website from any angle you want.
It is grounded in a rookie-friendly setup and a gorgeous simple search builder method. There are 15 different attributes that you can select for search filters. Map integration is another unique addition to this plugin which makes it even stronger.
The regular price of this plugin is only $29.
Jetpack Search
With over 5 million downloads and 5/5 user ratings, the simple featured Jetpack search plugin is indeed one of the good search plugins in the current days and age.
It is the most popular plugin on the market only due to its easy customization and improved accuracy in search results. The most notable features of this plugin are the spelling corrections advantage and instant results. This replaces the default WordPress search engine by adding a more real-time and improved functionality-based search system throughout the website.
Based on your site statistics, this plugin provides advanced prioritized search results and ensures an overall user experience.
In addition to this, with a real-time search index, the Jetpack search widget intuitively updates each content whenever you publish any new posts or do edits. If you are looking for a plugin with a poor budget, this is a great option for you as it costs only $5 per month for more feature, but you can use it free for adding a simple search bar to your site
In conclusion & Which Is Better?
In conclusion, the best WordPress search plugins are those that can be customized to your needs. If you have a site with many categories and pages, then Reactive Search Pro is great because it filters by category or page URL for results & has more advanced customized features. If all of your posts share an author name in their metadata, WP Extended Search will be better for you. I’ll recommend another search plugin named SearchWP which is for more professional websites for professional search filters and funcations.
Besides, the above listed 10 different search plugins are worth checking out. These plugins give people many different ways to search your website. They can be looking for a specific page or just want content from one place.
Which plugin do you use? What other ones would you recommend? Let me know in the comments below!
