A good website is all about a good user experience. Developers and designers work together to build a robust website that provides an excellent user experience and best results. WordPress has many unique features that help you create a solid website, but it is a very prevalent fact that the default WordPress search feature is not one of them. WordPress search function has its own limitations, and it may not fulfill your requirement for your website. There are so many plugins available in the market which can change your whole website’s look and feel. Here, we discuss some of the best search engine plugins that you can use for your website to provide your visitors more than just a search bar. These twelve search engine plugins are designed to enhance your default WordPress search bar and improve your website performance by providing more relevant and constructive information. So let’s get into the details.
1. Ajax Search Pro:
Ajax search pro is one of the best search engine plugins for websites. It has beautiful features and customizations to help you with your specific requirements. As its name suggests, this plugin’s prominent feature is its ability to add ajax live search to WordPress. It helps users to get better information and quick information. You should definitely replace your default WordPress search bar with the ajax search pro plugin to see the magical results and possibilities.
You get many valuable templates as well with this purchase to choose your style of displaying information. This well-documented and responsive plugin is perfectly compatible with page builders like Elementor, WPbakery, Divi page builder, etc. Multiple search bars, powerful filters, customization features, and excellent accuracy make this plugin a better-looking and better-performing search bar option for your website.
2. SearchWP:
SearchWP is one of the well-known search engine plugins for WordPress websites. It is a professionally crafted plugin with multiple useful features for your visitors and your brand. Custom fields, also known as post meta, are entirely ignored in WordPress search, but with this plugin, you can make that variable data searchable to improve search activity on your website. You can also highlight the search query in search results like the Google search engine does.
With SearchWP, you get the search metrics extension that analyzes the search data, search traffic, what your visitors are searching for, and what not to so that you can get an on-site calculation for your website to keep it updated. This plugin is also compatible with many page builders like Elementor, Divi, Beaver, and others. SearchWP is a fantastic plugin due to its unique nature and functions, which can take your website to the next level for user experience.
3. FacetWP:
If you have a website that includes tons of categories and listings, then this plugin is for you. You can introduce advanced filtering by adding faceted search functionality to your WordPress site. It allows users to find their desired result from a heavily loaded site, and they can filter their search results on various metrics predefined by the brand. This plugin is Ajax-based, so there is no reloading for users.
FacetWP can also give you outstanding results with SearchWP integration. This plugin is very lightweight and fast performing for heavy sites. It is developer-friendly as well while working perfectly with almost every theme type. There are lots of facet types like checkboxes, dropdowns, date ranges, sliders, pages, and proximity to fulfill different requirements. It is compatible with many widely used page builders like Elementor and Beaver builder. Overall an excellent plugin for eCommerce and multiple listings-oriented sites.
4. Relevanssi:
Relavanssi is one of the popular search plugins for WordPress sites. It is a powerful plugin that works excellent as a replacement for the WordPress default search option. You get some unique and beneficial features that can increase your website performance and search metrics. This translation-ready plugin supports integration with various plugins like a2Member, WooCommerce, and more. You get two versions to use as free and premium for your website. This plugin provides relevant search results from the search terms and not the publish date.
You get deeper indexing with this plugin for all kinds of content like PDF, documents, ePub, and shortcode content. It has an automatic search completion feature, and you can add ‘did you mean’ features to give user-relevant suggestions as well. It allows you to set weight for titles, fuzzy matching, phrase searching and, tags, and comments. Relavanssi is undoubtedly a fantastic plugin with all the excellent required features for the search bar on a website.
5. Reactive Search Pro:
Reactive search pro is very simple, fast, and easy to use for any website. You get unique and interesting features with this plugin that provides you unmatchable flexibility. This ultimate search builder has an advanced search, filter, and grid plugin powered by react-redux. And there is absolutely no complicated process to install this extendable WordPress search plugin. There is a lot more to explore and implement for you to get a tremendous change in user experience.
This plugin is compatible with WooCommerce, WPML, and Grid Builder for your convenience. You get 15+ search attributes like checkbox, map auto-complete, simple picker, image picker, color picker, text box, select box, and more. You can customize this plugin with easy drag and drop features to make it suitable for your site.
6. Jetpack Search:
If you are looking for a fast, lightweight, and good search engine plugin for your website, then Jetpack search is the best option for you. There are some fantastic features in this plugin that can give your website a completely different influence. It is a very easy-to-use plugin for developers as well as visitors because all the functions and benefits are super straightforward to follow. Your visitors can get highly relevant information with instant search and filters without any reloading.
This plugin offers filtered and faceted relevant searches with modern algorithms. It also has real-time indexing so that your data can appear in search results within a minute of changes. One of this plugin’s key features is it shows the most relevant, boosted and prioritized results based on your site’s statistics. Jetpack is a great search engine plugin to enhance your website and replace the default WordPress search function.
7. Ivory Search:
Ivory search plugin is the most favorable and affordable plugin with unique features to make your website better and user-friendly. It has a comfortable interface and easy to follow setup process with hundreds of options you can easily handle. One of the highlighted features of this plugin is you can create an unlimited number of search forms with their own unique settings. It also allows you to showcase your custom search on different parts of your website like header, footer, widget area, etc.
You get a surprising degree of control with this plugin regarding searching content. You can search for specific content through post titles, custom fields, metadata, taxonomy terms, and more. It also allows you to search data through its password protection status. Contrary, you can also easily exclude data based on specific criteria. This highly flexible and unique plugin is compatible with popular plugins like WooCommerce, Polylang, bb-Press, and others for your sake of convenience.
8. Swiftype Site Search:
If you want to replace your default WordPress search feature with some polished, advanced, and better search feature, then Swiftype Site Search is a perfect choice for you. Highly comfortable plugin with no coding skill required to achieve the most relevant and customizable search result experience. You get a clean and straightforward dashboard that contains all the required features to customize this as per your need. Moreover, to provide extreme customization, this plugin also supports more than thirteen languages.
Swiftype plugin comes with pre-optimized typo tolerance, bigram matching, stemming, synonyms, phrase matching, and more to provide maximum relevance. There is an automatic updating facility to see the changes in content directly on your search results. You also get one bonus feature as search analytics to get the right insights about your users, content, and website. Overall, Switype is an excellent plugin to provide the best user experience and to maintain it as well.
9. Ajax Search for WooCommerce:
It is one of the excellent plugins for adding a systematic search bar on your WooCommerce based website. This Ajax-powered search plugin makes your search results instant and accurate without any reloading. This plugin has a mobile-first approach to provide a special mobile search mode for a better user experience. There is no complicated process to embed this plugin into any website theme.
You can show product image, product price, product description, and SKU in live search results with this plugin. This ultra-fast search engine provides fuzzy search and conditional exclusion of products to ensure the best user experience. For any eCommerce site, the smart search bar is essential, which can offer suggestions, autocomplete terms, and excellent relevancy on every word and search sentence, and this plugin is most famous for that purpose only.
10. Better Search:
Better search is an advanced search plugin to replace your default wordpress search. With this plugin, you can offer more speedy and relevant content to your users. It is a translation-ready plugin and packed with some fantastic features to mold it according to your preferences. Users can search through posts, pages, and custom post types with this plugin. And it is a beautiful automatic plugin that offers seamless integration.
This plugin allows you to customize the output in many different ways, and you can also project your content by changing the weighting of post titles and post content. It offers results already sorted with relevance, and you can even display a list of popular search terms in the form of a heatmap with this plugin.
11. Site Search 360:
Site search 360 is the most reliable and flexible search plugin to offer your site’s best user experience. It is fully responsive and customization friendly that offers excellent control over your search results. The installation process is straightforward to follow, and the interface is also clean and subtle to offer an intelligent search experience.
You can boost your certain pages and content and increase page views with smart controls, and with its analytics, you can understand your users and performance metrics. Overall it is a complete plugin with the best features and performance.
12. SearchIQ:
SearchIQ is a great free plugin to replace the default WordPress search. You do not have to invest a huge amount of money and time in installing and using this. SearchIQ has all the advanced features with a fast mechanism to provide the most accurate information, be it on a small-scale website or a large and heavy website. With this plugin, you can customize the UI as well to make it more convenient.
You can manage the search results to boost your intended data, and it comes with in-built AI to handle typos, synonyms, and fuzzy matches. With this plugin, you get real-time analytics to get an overview of your user’s search pattern and your website’s delivery.
Websites without a search bar option not only affect your user experience but also affects your website’s performance from an SEO perspective. If you are building a heavy website with a number of pages and data, then the solid search bar’s feature becomes mandatory for your site. If a user is not getting his required information within a short time, then he may shift to another site. And this can increase your bounce rate and directly affect your rank on search engine pages. Using a solid search engine plugin can make your website more effective and easy to use rather than using the default WordPress search function. Whether you are building an eCommerce site or blogging site, search engine plugins as mentioned above can assure you the best ways of showcasing your data with optimum user experience.
