Best Search Plugins for WordPress: Free and Paid (2025)
Want to improve the site experience in your site?
By the end of this guide, you will have an idea of the best search plugins you can use in your WordPress website.
Here’s what we will tackle:
- What a search plugin is
- The best search plugins
- Insights on the key features and pricing
Ready? Let’s get started!
What is a search plugin?
Optimizing your website’s search functionality is important for enhancing user experience and ensuring visitors can easily find the information they’re looking for.
A search plugin is a WordPress add-on designed to enhance the efficiency and flexibility of the default search feature on your website.
These plugins add features such as real-time Ajax search, support for custom post types, and integration with ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce.
The goal is to provide a faster, more accurate search that helps users find what they need without sifting through irrelevant content.
Best Search Plugins for WordPress
As your site becomes more complex, upgrading your search plugin will also improve the site’s usability and performance in several ways.
Here are some of the best WordPress search plugins out there:
1. SearchWP
SearchWP is engineered to improve the relevance of search results, a more efficient and user-friendly search experience compared to the default WordPress search.
By allowing website owners to prioritize what content gets indexed, SearchWP ensures that visitors can find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily.
The plugin integrates seamlessly with WordPress, supporting custom post types, taxonomies, and even content created with page builders or custom fields.
💻 Key features
- Advanced indexing options: SearchWP indexes custom fields, PDF content, shortcodes, and custom database tables to make any content searchable.
- Customizable search algorithms: Users can adjust the weight of post titles, content, taxonomies, and custom fields to fine-tune search results.
- Integration with WooCommerce: Enhances search functionality on ecommerce sites by allowing searches within product details, categories, and custom fields.
- PDF and Office document indexing: SearchWP can index the content inside PDFs and Office documents attached to your posts or pages.
- Automatic integration with native WP search: It automatically replaces the standard WordPress search without needing to modify any templates.
- Search statistics and insights: Provides insights into what your visitors are searching for to help you understand their needs better.
- Extensive developer documentation: Offers comprehensive documentation and hooks, making it easy for developers to extend and customize the search functionality.
💰 Pricing
- Standard: $99/year for use on 1 site
- Pro: $199/year for use on 3 sites
- Agency: $399/year for use on unlimited sites
SearchWP and its high-performing services come with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
It’s clear that having a reliable search plugin can greatly enhance your WordPress site.
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2. Ajax Search Pro
Ajax Search Pro for WordPress is a highly customizable and efficient search plugin that is designed to be super fast without compromising on accuracy or relevance.
Ajax Search Pro is a future-proof investment that keeps your site’s search ahead of the curve through a wide array of content types, custom fields, attachments, and more.
Furthermore, it supports all languages and integrates seamlessly with all major page builders, making it a versatile choice for websites of any size or type.
💻 Key features
- Wide content support: Searches through various content types, including custom post types, taxonomy terms, attachments, WooCommerce products, and more.
- Multiple search bars: You can create numerous search instances with distinct configurations, each with its own unique shortcode and widget.
- All languages supported: The plugin offers full support for all languages, including those with special characters, to ensure global usability.
- High performance: Optimized for speed, Ajax Search Pro operates efficiently on your local server and requires no third-party services to secure fast search results.
- Page builder compatibility: Whether you’re using Elementor, Divi Builder, WPBakery, Oxygen Builder, or Gutenberg, Ajax Search Pro integrates seamlessly.
- Advanced customization and layouts: The plugin boasts over 400 back-end options, adjustable search logic, and various layouts & themes.
💰 Pricing
Although its free version is already robust in itself, its lifetime license is available for $39. It is a powerful and cost-effective solution, with a 7-day money-back guarantee.
3. ElasticPress
ElasticPress is a highly efficient and flexible search and query engine designed specifically for transforming and making more relevant the way sites search and query content.
The plugin is engineered to supercharge your WordPress website’s search and query capabilities to ensure fast and relevant content retrieval.
ElasticPress is compatible with popular plugins and is designed to make both users’ and administrators’ experiences more efficient and enjoyable.
💻 Key features
- Fast and relevant search results: ElasticPress leverages Elasticsearch to provide quick and accurate search results.
- Highly customizable: Offers a wide range of customization options to tailor the search experience to your site’s specific needs.
- Compatibility with WooCommerce: ElasticPress integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce to ensure that product searches are fast and relevant.
- Advanced query engine: Beyond just search, ElasticPress enhances WordPress queries and allows for complex content relationships and metadata.
- Scalability: Ideal for sites with large amounts of content, ElasticPress scales with your site and maintains performance as your content grows.
- Support for headless WordPress sites: Offers React components for integrating ElasticPress into headless WordPress setups, broadening its application.
💰 Pricing
- Essential: $79/month for up to 100,000 queries
- Extended: $299/month for up to 3 million queries
- Enterprise: $699/month for unlimited queries
ElasticPress grants a free trial before users fully subscribe to their elite services.
4. Ivory Search
Ivory Search is a highly functional and sophisticated WordPress search plugin that significantly enhances the search functionality on your WordPress site.
By offering advanced search features like creating unlimited custom search forms, Ivory Search ensures that content is easily accessible and visible to your site’s visitors.
Ivory Search is designed to meet a wide range of search needs, whether for a basic blog, an ecommerce site, or other sites with vast amounts of similar content.
💻 Key features
- Advanced WooCommerce product search: It allows for detailed searches within WooCommerce products, including searching by product type and attributes.
- Comprehensive media search: You can search through media, attachments, and files based on title, caption, and description.
- Unlimited custom search forms: Create as many custom search forms as you need, each with its own configuration to search or exclude certain types of content.
- Flexible display options: Search forms can be displayed anywhere on your site and within page content using shortcodes.
- Exclusion features: Offers detailed control over what content can be excluded from search results to refine the search experience on your site.
- Enhanced search control and ordering: Configure the number of posts to display on search results pages, highlight searched terms, and use keyword stemming.
💰 Pricing
Ivory Search offers highly customizable and tiered pricing plans starting from $19.99/year for one site.
It also provides an already powerful free version with limited features but with lifetime support and updates.
5. Better Search
Better Search is a powerful WordPress plugin that aims to improve the accuracy of search results by focusing on the title and content of posts.
This plugin seamlessly integrates with most WordPress themes and supports a wide range of content types, including pages, custom post types, authors, tags, and comments.
Moreover, it offers insights into what visitors are searching for on your site, so you can adjust your content strategy accordingly.
💻 Key features
- Seamless integration: Works effortlessly with most WordPress themes to enhance the search experience without disrupting your site’s design.
- Relevance-sorted results: Automatically orders search results according to relevance by prioritizing the most pertinent content for users.
- Support for various content types: Searches across blog post titles, content, pages, custom post types, excerpts, meta fields, authors, tags, comments, and more.
- Insights into user searches: Tracks what visitors are searching for, enabling you to display popular searches on your blog through a heatmap.
- Caching plugin support: Compatible with popular caching plugins like WP Super Cache to help speed up search results and improve website performance.
- Customization options: Allows for the fine-tuning of search results to give you full control to assign greater weight to either titles or content.
💰 Pricing
Better Search is a free plugin. True to its name, it is also better in terms of cutting costs and promoting accessibility.
6. Swiftype Site Search
Swiftype Site Search not only simplifies the search integration but also ensures that the functionality feels like an integral part of your site, rather than an add-on.
Swiftype is known for its exceptional relevance, ease of integration, and robust set of features that cater to ecommerce platforms, online publications, and other sites.
With its powerful analytics, customizable search algorithms, and user-friendly tools, it helps you deliver highly relevant search results.
💻 Key features
- Code-free integration: You can add a search simply by entering your website’s address, and Swiftype will index your site and create a search engine in real-time.
- Autocomplete functionality: Provides real-time results as users type their queries, guiding them to the content, answers, or products that matter most.
- Faceted search: Users can refine their search results by various attributes such as date, price, author, location, or content type.
- Advanced search algorithm: Incorporates language-specific relevance models, multilingual support, spelling correction, and synonym management.
- Content ingestion and rich results: Swiftype’s powerful content syncing capabilities include both an intelligent web crawler and an API platform.
- Search controls and analytics: Gain actionable insights with Swiftype Analytics, which offers detailed reports on how users interact with your search function.
- Developer-friendly tools: Swiftype provides developers with extensive APIs for content acquisition and querying for seamless integration.
💰 Pricing
- Standard: $79/month for core search features
- Pro: $199/month for cross-domain search
Swiftype Site Search grants a 14-day free trial before users may fully subscribe to their elite services.
7. SearchIQ
SearchIQ is a powerful and efficient search plugin designed to enhance the user search experience by delivering fast and accurate results.
With its real-time indexing feature, SearchIQ ensures that all your content is searchable as soon as it’s published.
Its compatibility with a wide range of WordPress themes and plugins makes it a versatile choice for website owners looking to improve their site’s search functionality.
💻 Key features
- Real-time indexing: Updates your search index instantly whenever content is added, modified, or deleted, to ensure that search results are always current.
- Customizable search algorithms: Offers the flexibility to adjust search algorithms for delivering relevant results.
- Faceted search: Enables users to refine their search results through various filters to make it easier to find specific content.
- Auto-suggestion capability: Provides instant suggestions as users type in the search box, to promote usability and efficiency.
- Search analytics: Offers insights into what your visitors are searching for and allows you to optimize your content strategy accordingly.
- Cross-domain search support: Ideal for businesses with multiple websites, as it can fetch and display search results from across all your sites.
- Enhanced PDF indexing: Unlike many other search plugins, SearchIQ can index PDF content in order to make it searchable on your site.
💰 Pricing
- Startup: $19/month for search of up to 5,000 documents
- Pro: $129/month for search of up to 100,000 documents
- Enterprise: $899/month for search of unlimited documents
SearchWP also offers a strong free version that permits search of up to 2,000 documents.
8. FacetWP
FacetWP is a sophisticated WordPress plugin ideal for websites with a large amount of content, including ecommerce stores, directories, blogs, and portfolios.
FacetWP stands out for its flexibility, ease of use, and the rich, customizable experience it offers to both site owners and visitors.
With its advanced filtering options, FacetWP allows users to drill down into your content using various criteria such as categories, tags, custom fields, and more.
💻 Key features
- Facet types: FacetWP offers a wide variety of facet types including checkboxes, dropdowns, date ranges, sliders, and even star ratings.
- Integration with popular builders: Seamlessly integrates with popular page builders like Elementor to allow easy insertion of facets into your page layouts.
- Customizable templates: Gives you full control over how your content is presented to users after filtering.
- Advanced querying options: Provides advanced options for querying data and allows you to display content based on complex criteria.
- AJAX-powered refreshes: FacetWP utilizes AJAX to refresh content dynamically, which means your pages won’t need to reload each time a user applies a new filter.
- Shortcode and PHP function support: Offers flexibility by providing shortcodes and PHP functions, making it easy to integrate widgets and template files.
- Extensive add-on library: FacetWP comes with a range of add-ons, including integrations with other plugins, additional facet types, and other tools.
💰 Pricing
- Basic: $99/year for use on up to 3 sites
- Professional: $249/year for use on up to 20 sites
FacetWP grants a free trial version before users may fully subscribe to their elite services.
9. WP Extended Search
WP Extended Search is a free, lightweight yet robust plugin designed to enhance the default WordPress search functionality.
It allows for extended search capabilities including post meta, author names, categories, tags, and custom taxonomies.
With this, you can customize the default search and create multiple search settings for different search forms.
💻 Key features
- Customizable search settings: Create an unlimited number of search settings to apply to custom search forms to flex how searches are conducted on your site.
- Exclusion of old content: Exclude outdated content from search results to ensure that users find the most relevant and current information.
- Customizable search results order: Offers the option to customize the order of search results to pave the way for prioritization of certain types of content.
- Adjustable posts display: Users can choose the number of posts to display in search results, optimizing the user experience by controlling result density.
- WooCommerce integration: Integrates with WooCommerce, allows for SKU searches, and enhances the search capabilities of online stores.
- Search across various elements: Enables searching within post meta, author names, categories, tags, and custom taxonomies.
- Shortcode and widget support: Display custom search forms anywhere on your site using shortcodes or WordPress widgets.
💰 Pricing
WP Extended Search is a free plugin. This makes it a suitable plugin for site owners of all backgrounds and budgets.
10. Search & Filter Pro
Search & Filter Pro revolutionizes the way users interact with content on WordPress websites by allowing your visitors to refine their search results using various filters.
This precision leads to a more satisfying and efficient user experience, as site visitors can quickly find the content that’s most relevant to them.
The plugin integrates seamlessly with WordPress, WooCommerce, and a range of other plugins, an extremely adaptable choice for a variety of websites.
💻 Key features
- Powerful filtering options: Users can filter and tailor search results by categories, tags, custom fields, post types, and more.
- AJAX-powered results: Ensures a fast, dynamic update of search results without the need to reload the page.
- Integration with WooCommerce: Perfect for ecommerce sites, and enables customers to search and filter products according to their specific needs.
- Customizable results template: Offers the ability to fully customize the layout and design of your search results page.
- Support for custom post types: Ensures that every part of your site’s content is searchable, from standard posts and pages to custom post types.
- Advanced custom fields support: Works seamlessly with ACF, as it allows you to filter by custom fields for more precise search results.
💰 Pricing
- Single site: $25 for use on 1 site only
- Developer: $85 for use on unlimited sites with a year of updates and support
Search & Filter Pro showcases a wide toolbox of features that integrate with other popular plugins, a must-have for every growing site owner.
11. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search
YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search is a dynamic search plugin designed to improve navigation specifically for WooCommerce stores.
The plugin improves the online shopping experience by providing instant search results as users type their queries, leading to increased conversions.
Its Ajax-powered search mechanism ensures that the search results are fast and relevant, improving the overall usability of your website.
💻 Key features
- Ajax search: Enables real-time search results as users type their queries, hence providing an immediate and interactive search experience.
- Widget and shortcode support: Offers flexibility in search placement and allows you to add search bars using either widgets or shortcodes.
- Customizable search widget: Tailor the search box appearance to fit your site’s design in order to facilitate seamless integration with your online store’s aesthetics.
- Search by categories or tags: Users can refine their search results by categories or tags to make it easier to find specific products.
- WPML compatibility: Fully compatible with WPML, thus suitable for multilingual WooCommerce sites.
- Search history & autocomplete: Suggests products and predicts user needs based on past searches and autocomplete.
- Advanced search options: Provides customizable options for searching within specific product details, such as SKU, description, and excerpt.
💰 Pricing
YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search is available for €79.99/year. It also secures users with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
12. Jetpack Search
Jetpack Search is a premium search solution developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and the Jetpack plugin itself.
This plugin prioritizes performance and accuracy without sacrificing user-friendliness and even works well with WooCommerce stores.
Leveraging the power of Elasticsearch, Jetpack Search processes all indexing on WordPress.com‘s servers to ensure your site’s performance remains unaffected.
💻 Key features
- Elasticsearch-powered: Utilizes the advanced search capabilities of Elasticsearch for accurate and fast search results.
- Offload processing: All indexing and processing happen on external servers, thus effectively reducing the load on your website.
- Custom search overlay: Replaces the default WordPress search with a customizable search overlay.
- Live search suggestions: Offers live search suggestions and allows visitors to see results as they type.
- Filtered and faceted searches: Enables visitors to filter results by categories, tags, dates, custom taxonomies, and more.
- Highlighted search terms: Highlights search terms in comments and post content for easier navigation.
- Language support and analysis: Supports all languages with advanced analysis for over 29 languages and a diverse range of content.
💰 Pricing
Jetpack Search is available in a bundle with other state-of-the-art Jetpack plugins starting from a low cost of $6.76/month, secured with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
13. Programmable Search Engine by Google
The Google Programmable Search Engine is a powerful tool designed to enhance your website’s search capabilities by leveraging Google’s search technology.
It is an ideal solution for website owners looking to provide their visitors with a superior search experience, with the reliability and efficiency synonymous with Google.
The plugin allows you to create a customized search experience tailored to your WordPress site and enables users to search for content within your site or across specific sites you choose.
💻 Key features
- Customization options: Tailor the look and feel of your search engine to match your WordPress site’s design and ensure a cohesive user experience.
- Auto-complete feature: Offers search suggestions as users type their queries, resulting in a faster and more intuitive search experience.
- Search refinements: Allows users to narrow down their search results using categories and tags in order to flesh out the most relevant content.
- Google’s search algorithms: Benefit from Google’s advanced search algorithms and gain access to accurate and relevant search results.
- Multi-site search: The capability to search across multiple websites or specific web pages offers flexibility in how content can be searched.
- Analytics integration: Integrates with Google Analytics to allow you to analyze how visitors use the search function on your site and inform SEO strategies.
💰 Pricing
The best thing about Google Programmable Search Engine is that you do not have to pay, and may even earn revenue, by showing relevant ads on your site with Google AdSense.
Choosing the Right Search Plugin
Choosing the right search plugin for your WordPress site boils down to understanding your site’s unique needs and audience.
Consider the size of your site, the complexity of your content, and whether you need advanced features like multilingual support or ecommerce integration.
As a final tip, always keep an eye on user feedback and plugin updates to ensure your chosen solution remains the best fit for your site as it grows and evolves.
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