Top WordPress Search Plugins To Improve Site Search Experience
In order to improve the session duration and engagement of your website, one thing you need to deeply focus, that is improving the site search experience.
A blog website or a news site which typically flooded with content, make it is quite hard to read selected article or news as per the visitor’s choice. That is nothing hard to understand that a website that has thousands of different articles is placed and you are specifically interested in one topic. So, you have searched across the website unless it has a simple yet powerful site search mechanism.
WordPress users have a special gig in this regard, site search plugins. Just add a reputed and powerful site search plugin and users can easily find their preferred content with ease.
In this article, we will take you through one of the top site search plugins.
Besides, if you are not aware properly of the site search feature at all, you will learn about it.
What is a site search plugin?
The site search plugin basically helps users to reach their interesting topics through the website they are on. Most likely, people on articles or news websites search for specific topics besides the suggested contents. It works quite similar to Google, Amazon, and other searchable places where people search billions of queries each day together.
If we take Google, Amazon, or Bing, they are great places because they help people search for what they are looking for. However, the site search plugin works differently than those giants. Google has some stat-of the art-algorithm, crawlers, and bots that work through trillions of web pages all across the internet and find the most accurate results you are searching for. Site search plugins work inside a website. But, they have one common thing in them, they are smart enough to find your searched content easily.
Benefits of using site search plugins:
There are numerous benefits of adding the searching relevant content to your site.
Increases engagement:
If you just created your beautiful news or article website and haven’t enough content yet, you won’t realize the importance of a site search plugin to your website. But the image you worked on for years to your site and have written thousands of articles on various topics. Now, when a visitor lands through searching on Google to your website and reads the article if they find it’s interesting enough, most likely they are going to search several other contents on the same topic. Now as you have thousands of articles, how they can find their relevant articles?
So, in most cases, people just simply move away after reading the article if they do not have any search option either. So site search plugin definitely increases your website engagement as well as the session duration.
Improves user experience:
A good amount of fresh and useful content is undoubtedly a crucial aspect of your success but the user experience is also a major means for your success. If neglected you won’t see expected growth. All the successful websites are always monitored through various Cookies, and tools that where visitors are engaging the most to their site or where they are losing interest. Site search plugins help people find their preferred content so easily.
Increases opportunity:
If you are selling something through your website or blog or doing affiliate marketing, you would like to increase the chances of conversions. More content engagement and exploration will increase the chance of a conversion. For example, if someone is reading some content one by one, there is a high chance at a point they will be convinced.
However, if you know about WordPress, they offer native site search functionality to the users. But, definitely, that is not up to the mark, because if that would so, why there are so many site search plugins floating around. That’s the reason we have summarized some top site search plugins for your WordPress site. The list is created with both the free and premium plugins so that everyone can choose the right one according to their budget.
Let’s get started the list with,
Ajax Search:
It is one of the well-known and widely used site search plugins for WordPress. They use some of the best technologies that help people show live results and once someone just starts typing anything on the search bar, it starts suggesting and does not wait for the completion of typing. Once you end typing, without entering the search, it starts showing you the most relevant results.
The plugin uses JavaScript and XML to fetch results from the whole website. The search experience is as good for mobile users as the desktop. However, Ajax can show the images to your content without refreshing the page if you have the images.
Ajax pricing:
Ajax is a freemium site search plug-in. If you don’t want to go for the premium plans, you can use them for free with fewer features. For the advanced and more powerful features, you have to go for the premium plans. The premium plan which is called the Ajax Search Pro starts at $36 which is for a lifetime. If you are looking for an extended license with enhanced features you have to pay $255. That is also one time. However, there are many addons for media service subscriptions.
Jetpack site search:
If you already searched about WordPress, or have a WordPress site, probably you have Jetpack installed into it, or came across the term Jetpack. In case, you are not aware, you can read: Everything You Need To Know About Jetpack WordPress Plugin to know in detail about Jetpack.
Jetpack is actually a bundle of useful plugins and functionalities. You can have many add-ons when you pay for them. Amongst the addons, there is also an option for site search. If you are looking for a robust site search option to integrate into your WordPress site, jetpack would be a nice fit for you. You can add filters and clauses on what type of results you want to show when someone uses the search bar. The search works quite fast and uses advanced filtering options, post types, mobile compatibility, and more.
Jetpack site search pricing:
Jetpack site search is actually an ad on and there is no free option to give it a try. You have to upgrade with at least $5 per month. The pricing is depended on the number of records your site contains. Here the record defines the number of content be it a post, a product, pages, media files, videos, and other custom posts. As your records grow, your charges reach higher.
FacetWP:
facetWP is yet another powerful site search plugin for WordPress sites. But if you have a website where you selling something, have multiple products and people would choose from there then it might be a good fit. But it is not by means that blog or article websites cannot use this site search plugin. Actually, the plugin has lots of advanced filter options that narrow down the search and help visitors reach their choice of product or an article. This plugin uses the post meta and custom types that people use while creating their website.
The plugin is lightning fast and filtering takes place instantly without refreshing the page. To give enhanced results it uses an index table. Another benefit of using the plugin is it can be used to make more powerful the default WordPress search box and it is compatible with other WordPress search plugins if you are searching for an enhanced filter and functionality for your search.
FacetWP pricing:
FacetWP is a premium site search plugin that does not offer any refunds. So before you go for buying, you need to be sure and check all the features thoroughly. However, they offer a free trial version with limited functionalities. The starting plan is $99 per year which is for 1-3 websites. It offers 1-year support and updates. You get 20% off while you renew your plan. If your requirement is higher and you need to go with the PROFESSIONAL plan that costs $249 per year. You can use it on 20 websites. The support, add and updates are the same as the BASIC plan.
Relevanssi:
If you are looking to improve your site search functionality, you can give it a try on Relevanssi. Not only the posts, and products but also tags, comments on your posts, categories, and custom fields can be filtered too. Its robust algorithm will show the results that closely match the search in case the exact result is not available. Even if you have documents on your site they can also be searched through the Relevanssi. It supports bbPress and is friendly with Gutenberg. With advanced features, you can add Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions.
Only one thing that is noted by the developers of that plugin is that Relevanssi requires hundreds of megabytes of data space to perform. In case you have limited space for database tables on your hosting, it is not recommended by its developers themselves.
Relevanssi pricing:
Relevanssi is also a freemium search plugin. As per your requirements, you can either go for the free or paid version. The unpaid version offers bbPress integration, exact phrase and fuzzy matching, highlighting the results, and more. If you choose the premium plans you get features like PDF document indexing, user profiles, and taxonomy. The Google-style “did you mean?” suggestion is also available with the premium plans There are two plans. If you choose the yearly plan you need to pay $99 per year or you can pay $349 to opt into the lifetime plan.
Ivory search:
Ivory search is another great search plugin you can add to your WordPress site. It helps search the images, media, attachment files, videos, and PDF documents. The search is executed through the title, caption, and description. Another benefit Ivory search provides is you can create unlimited search forms and configure each search form separately to use them for search-oriented content. It also works pretty well with the native WordPress search functionality.
Ivory search pricing:
You get also options two choose from the free plan and premium. There are two premium plans. With the free plan, you get features such as unlimited search forms, configuring search forms separately, searching specific content on the site, searching products on WooCommerce, searching through titles, captions, descriptions of images, attachments, and more. Also, you get one year of support and updates with the free plan.
However, obviously, the premium plans offer many enhancements of features like searching content through authors, filtering posts that have specific post status, and all the free plan features. This plugin is much costlier than most others. You can choose the Pro plan which costs $149.99 per year or you can choose the Pro Plus plan which costs $249.99 per year. The Pro Plus plan offers features such as excluding “out of stock” WooCommerce products from search, one-year priority email, forum and help center support.
Better search:
The list won’t get complete without a fully free site search plugin for WordPress websites. We have the plugin Better Search. Even though it is free, it does not lack robustness and features. You get many customized filter options, people can reach accurate search results based on the title and post content in seconds. Another great thing about the plugin is it tracks the search behavior of the user and uses the data to generate a visual search heatmap. That helps you get the vital information to know what people are looking at your website the most. The plugin is compatible with most WordPress plugins, and with the touch of additional CSS, you can change its style. It is also compatible with popular cache plugins such as Wp-Super-Cache, W3 Total cache, and more. For people who do not have any budget for a site search plugin and have few requirements, this plugin might be a great solution.
Better Search price:
The Better Search plugin is completely free to use.
WP Extended Search:
If you are looking for a simple yet powerful search plugin for your WordPress site, that helps your users find content more easily, you can choose WP Extended Search. It is also a popular plug-in among WordPress lovers that help you customize WordPress search in post Meta, Author names, tags, categories, or Custom Taxonomies. You can add multiple search combinations and take control of the full system. The plugin is also compatible with WooCommerce.
WP Extended Search price:
The plug-in is also a free one.
These are one of the top search plugins for your WordPress, which you can try. All of these are quite a good number of installs and ratings are also impressive.
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