The wordpress search bar is a no frills search bar. It does its job, but it can be so much more.
On every site I build, I always include a search bar enhancement to give site users a better experience.
There are 2 distinct types of enhanced search bars.
- Cloud connections pull your data and store it in a giant, very fast cloud database. These are paid subscription services. Some offer free accounts. They are lightning fast and be configured in lots of different ways. The grunt work is done on the cloud servers, and doesn’t add extra loads to your own database. Good for large sites.
- Self Hosted connection to your database. Speed depends on your server, database settings, site traffic and code efficiency. They are fast enough… but a lot depends on your server. Good for smaller sites.
Here are some note worthy plugins to check out.
Relevansi
Type: Self Hosted
Price: Free and Premium
Checkout the Premium Features here
Relevanssi has been around for a while. Perhaps 10 years or more. It was of the first search plugins I used for a better search results. Offers powerful pattern matching and restrictions, including custom fields, users, custom post types and taxonomies. Its also multi site compatible and has CLI support in the premium version.
SearchWP
Type: Self Hosted
Price Free
The is the little brother to the Premium SearchWP plugin. Lightweight and easy to use. Auto connects to the default wordpress search bar. Ships with a search widget that can be placed anywhere on your site.
Elastic Press
Type: Cloud
Price: Premium
Elastic press offer a free trial… but you have to add your credit card up front. To me it’s weird offering a free trial to then have to reach for the credit card. An about page couldn’t be found either so I was unsure which country they operate from. A whois search only showed a bunch of redacted content. The documentation was extensive but needs an easy setup section aimed at entry level users, otherwise, its for developers.
Ivory Search
Type: Self Hosted
Price: Free and Premium
Ivory Search has a search form builder where specific search forms can be made to search on specific pages. Each form can be configured to sort an prioritise content on each page. The forms can be easily added to menus, widgets, headers, footers and sidebars. Plenty of configurable options, clear documentation and easy styling.
YITH Woocommerce ajax search
Type: Self Hosted
Price: Free and Premium
Check out the Premium Features here
YITH are known for their extensive wordpress plugin library. This plugin has a good set of features where it uses woocommerce tags, taxonomies and attributes as filters. Performance is governed by the number of products in the woocommerce catalogue and server speed.
FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce
Type: Self Hosted
Price: Free and Premium
FiboSearch claim they are the fasted self hosted wordpress search plugin with speeds around 0.2 seconds in the premium version. They use an inverted index where there is little difference between 500 and 100K products. It is typo tolerant, supports custom fields, uses thumbnails and its configuration options allow sorting and prioritizing. Google analytics support to track searches. Theme support and page builder support. Documentation is good with styling and custom code enhancements. Well reviewed.
WOOF – Products Filter for WooCommerce
Type: Self Hosted
Price: Free and Premium
WOOF is a woocomemrce filter and has a good set of features including ajax which can be turned on or off depending on what type of functionality is required. Shortcodes can display the search filters anywhere and options are easy enough for entry level users.
WP Extended Search
Type: Self Hosted
Price: Free
This plugin is completely free and has a good set of features including custom post types and taxonomies. Lightweight and very easy to set up.
Better Search
Type: Self Hosted
Price: Free
Totally free plugin with heaps of features including cache support for popular WP caching plugins. As soon as the plugin is activated it replaces the default search behaviour. The search widget allows the search form to be placed anywhere on your site.
Algolia
Type: Cloud
Price: Free plan + Tiered plans depending on the number of Searches.
Algolia are perhaps the biggest cloud site search tool on the market today. They have colossal library of resources and even have their own academy. I tend to use Algolia because the WP template files were easy to edit and style and the sorting and ranking algorithm are excellent. Its very fast, returning results within 20 milliseconds. The back end dashboard was easy to use and provides stats on search queries.
Conclusion
The self hosted Ajax search solutions deliver search results as a dropdown list from the search bar itself. Other self hosted Plugins such as Relevanssi don’t use ajax as the user types but delivers better results after the user has hit enter and traversed to the results page. For larger sites, cloud hosted tools such Algolia offer a far better search experience delivering results very very quickly.
Damon is the Principal Full Stack Developer at WPFix and freelance consultant. If you need help implementing anything wordpress related, please reach out to make an appointment.
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