8+ best WooCommerce product search plugins (2024)

Complete Guide to the 8+ best WooCommerce product search plugins (2021)

The product search and filters that come with WooCommerce are pretty basic. On top of this, they don’t make it easy for customers to find products on your online store. Fortunately, there's an easy solution - the best WooCommerce product search plugin!

You need a solid WooCommerce product search plugin that lets you enhance the default search options on your online store. This way, you can make it much easier for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. As a result, you’ll be able to increase product visibility and boost sales in your WooCommerce store.

In this article, we’ll go over some of the best WooCommerce product search plugins as well as filter plugins. Together they provide the best way for customers to find products quickly and easily.

Top 8 WooCommerce product search plugins

Let’s dive deeper into the top eight best WooCommerce product search plugins. We'll discover how they help you improve the customer experience on your WooCommerce site.

The important thing to understand is that different search plugins work in different ways. There are lots of good options, and which one to use depends on the features you need. As you can see from this search plugin comparison table, one plugin isn't really better than the others - instead, they have different features which you can mix and match to get the right functionality:

Product Filters Product Table YITH AJAX Search SearchWP Advanced Woo Search Smart Woo Search Fibo Search Advanced Product Search
AJAX keyword search
Product filters
Search within categories
Predictive search results
Customize search logic
Customize search results display

#1. WooCommerce Product Filters

WooCommerce product filter AJAX plugin

The WooCommerce Product Filters plugin lets you create and add different types of product filters to any WooCommerce store. It has everything you need to help customers to search for products in the most efficient way possible.

Features

  • Find products by anything - categories, attributes, colors, tags, custom taxonomies, price, ratings, stock status, and even whether or not products are on sale.
  • Excellent customer experience with multiple filter styles - dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, images, color swatches, tag clouds, labels, sliders, and more.
  • Structure filters into groups and quickly display them anywhere on your site.
  • Choose between instant AJAX method or traditional button-click.
  • No risk 30-day money back guarantee.

Pros and cons

While WooCommerce Product Filter is more of a filter plugin than a search plugin, it's an essential additional to any store which has lots of products. That's because if you just install a WooCommerce search plugin then customers might type the wrong thing in the search box and find no results. In contrast, a filter gives customers pre-set options to choose from. That way, they can't possibly make a mistake - ensuring that they will find what they're looking for. This results in more sales for you!

WooCommerce toggle product filters open closed screenshot

As you can see, the best product search plugin makes it easy for customers to narrow down their WooCommerce search and find products quickly. Use it on its own, or with any of the following plugins to add an advanced WooCommerce product search box. Using filters and a search box provides the best possible user experience. That's because customers have a choice of typing their own key phrase, or searching from pre-defined options. Different people find products in different ways, so this gives you the best possible chance of success.

Pricing

WooCommerce Product Filters comes with a range of price options, starting at $79. You can choose from annual or lifetime licenses, and choose the number of sites you wish to use it on.

It's also available as a standalone plugin or as a 2-plugin bundle with its sister plugin, WooCommerce Product Table (featured below). This brings significant savings compared to buying both plugins together.

#2. WooCommerce Product Table

WooCommerce Product List View Order Form Table Plugin

The WooCommerce Product Table plugin helps you increase sales on your WooCommerce store by letting you showcase your products in attractive one-page order forms.

WooCommerce Product Table is a search plugin that lets you display WooCommerce products in a user-friendly order form, on top of adding search options to your online store. You can change the layout of your WooCommerce products and add an instant AJAX search box along with filters above product tables.

You can just use the WooCommerce product search box that comes with the Product Table plugin. Or alternatively, you can supercharge it by using it alongside the following plugins:

  • WooCommerce Product Filters (featured above)For more advanced filtering, you can use WooCommerce Product Table with WooCommerce Product Filters.
  • SearchWP (featured below)Similarly, the AJAX-powered WooCommerce Product Table search box uses exact match search. You can add advanced search conditional logic by using it together with SearchWP. The two plugins integrate perfectly with the WooCommerce Product Table plugin by Barn2 and let you display a custom advanced search box above the product table.
WooCommerce Product Table with Filters
Using Product Table with the WooCommerce Product Filters plugin

Features

  • AJAX-powered instant search box.
  • Quick product order form layout.
  • Customizable table columns - choose which information to display about each product.
  • Filter dropdowns which work in combination with the search box.
  • Allow customers to choose quantities, variations and add to the cart directly from the product table view.

Pros and cons

The biggest strength of WooCommerce Product Table as a search plugin is also its biggest weakness! What I mean by this is that it changes your store's layout, replacing the default product grid with an interactive product table/order form. If this layout suits the type of products you sell, then it's perfect because it enhances the WooCommerce search and your store layout at the same time. However, it's not suitable for products that need large images.

Pricing

WooCommerce Product Filters is available on its own, or as a 2-plugin bundle with WooCommerce Product Filters. For the best savings, get it from the WooCommerce Product Filters sales page.

Or if you just need the product table view with search box, then it's available from $99. Choose from 1, 5 or 20 site licenses, either annual or lifetime.

#3. YITH WooCommerce AJAX Search

YITH WooCommerce AJAX Search

The YITH WooCommerce AJAX Search plugin offers an all-in-one solution for integrating an effective search engine on your WooCommerce store.

Features

  • Add advanced search boxes above your main shop pages.
  • Search for products within specific categories or tags.
  • Display prices and badges in search results. These are good for promoting sales and discounted products on your WooCommerce store.

Pros and cons

YITH WooCommerce AJAX search offers one of the most sophisticated search boxes that are available for WooCommerce. I like the fact that customers can choose categories or tags as well as typing a keyword search term. However, it doesn't add any more advanced filtering capabilities to WooCommerce - for example, the ability to filter by product attributes or other product data.

Having said that, it's still an excellent WooCommerce search plugin. You can easily get around the above limitation by using it with WooCommerce Product Filters (our #1 pick). This way, you can offer customers a choice when they need to find specific products.

Pricing

From €89.99/year

#4. SearchWP

SearchWP

SearchWP is a robust plugin dedicated to enhancing the search options on WordPress sites. It doesn't change how the search box or search results look. Instead, it adds super powers to the WooCommerce search logic, making it much more sophisticated.

Features

  • Configure multiple search engines for different parts of your WooCommerce atore.
  • Customize the search algorithm, for example by adding negative keywords, synonyms (useful for common misspellings), including or excluding specific pages from search, etc.
  • Built-in WooCommerce search analytics, letting you monitor search statistics and insights.

Pros and cons

If you're using the built-in WooCommerce Product Search widget then I'd definitely recommend installing SearchWP. It makes it significantly more advanced.

I love the analytics and reporting feature because it lets you analyze how customers are using it. For example, you can see what people are searching for and make sure your pages are optimized for the right keywords etc. You can also discover what failed searches people are doing and make changes to minimize these in future. For instance, if you sell t-shirts and see a lot of failed searches for 'tshirt' then you can add it as a synonym so that it displays products containing the phrase 't-shirt'.

The only disadvantages of SearchWP are that it doesn't change the appearance of the WooCommerce search, and it doesn't provide any filtering options. You'd need to use it alongside WooCommerce Product Filters to add an advanced search box in addition to advanced product filters.

Pricing

From $99/year

#5. Advanced Woo SearchAdvanced Woo Search

Advanced Woo Search is a powerful WooCommerce product search plugin that offers quick AJAX search boxes.

Features

  • Replace the default WooCommerce product search with a more user-friendly search box.
  • Search within a specific category.
  • Predictive search.
  • Custom search results page layout, complete with badges to draw attention to products on sale.
  • Works with WooCommerce Product Filters to add filters alongside the search box.

Pros and cons

WooCommerce Advanced Search is a neat plugin, but isn't as sophisticated as YITH's WooCommerce AJAX Search. For example, it has fewer features. As a result, I'd recommend YITH's solution instead.

The plugin offers a lightweight solution for implementing an advanced search engine on your WooCommerce site. You can let customers search products by product title, products tags, IDs, and SKUs. The plugin is easy to set up and use. Paste the shortcode or use the widget to display an advanced search box anywhere on your online store.

The best part about WooCommerce Advanced Search is that it can be used with the WooCommerce Product Filters plugin to add advanced product finding options to your store along with an advanced search box.

Pricing

Free

#6. Smart WooCommerce Search

Smart WooCommerce Search

The Smart WooCommerce Search plugin offers a robust solution that helps you improve the customer experience and boost sales on your online store.

Features

  • Add a predictive search box to the top of your WooCommerce shop and category pages.
  • Comes with its own product search results layout.
  • Option to exclude out-of-stock products from search results.
  • Search within a specific category only.
  • Works with WooCommerce Product Filters to add filters alongside the search box.
  • Integrates with page builder plugins such as Elementor, Divi, and WPBakery Page Builder.

Pros and cons

Just like Advanced Woo Search, the Smart WooCommerce Search Plugin is quite good at what it does. However, it's not quite as fully-featured or easy to use as YITH's WooCommerce AJAX Search.

Pricing

Free

#7. FiboSearch

FiboSearch

FiboSearch is a WooCommerce product search plugin designed to help you integrate a responsive, fast search box in your WooCommerce store.

Features

  • Search WooCommerce and find products by product title, long and short descriptions, and by product SKU.
  • Predictive search.
  • Display product images, product prices, and product descriptions in search results.
  • Works with the WooCommerce Product Filters plugin for adding filters to the page sidebar.

Pros and cons

Fibosearch is a well coded plugin with an interactive search form and a lot of customizations options for a free plugin.

Pricing

Free

#8. Advanced Product Search For WooCommerce

Advanced Product Search

The Advanced Product Search plugin offers an intuitive way to set up advanced search boxes and lets customers search WooCommerce and find products quickly.

Features

  • Adds an eye-catching search bar to the top of your WooCommerce shop pages.
  • Search globally or within a selected category.
  • Use widgets and shortcodes to display search boxes anywhere on your WordPress site.
  • Displays the best results in a dropdown before the full search results loads.
  • Works with WooCommerce Product Filters plugin to add filter widgets on the same pages as your search boxes.

Pros and cons

This WooCommerce advanced search plugin is a well designed option with lots of features. While it's just a search and doesn't contain any type of product filtering, that doesn't matter if you use it with WooCommerce Product Filters. I like its flexibility and how easy it is to add search boxes to any page or widget.

Pricing

Free

The best WooCommerce product search solution: WooCommerce Product Filters + Product Table

WooCommerce Product Filters Table Integration

So, what is the best WooCommerce search plugin? Well, there isn't one because of the importance of having both searching and filtering in your store. Customers need multiple ways to search WooCommerce and find products, so you need to combine multiple methods for best results.

Based on the needs of your store, I'd recommend combining any or all of the following WooCommerce search plugins:

  • The WooCommerce Product Filters plugin lets you add a wide range of methods for searching WooCommerce and finding products more easily. You can choose to display it horizontally or vertically above the list of products or in a sidebar.
  • On the other hand, the WooCommerce Product Table plugin changes the actual layout of your products by listing them in a structured table layout with an AJAX search box above. Use both plugins together to create quick one-page order forms with advanced search filtering 🚀
  • And if you don't want to change your store layout, then use Product Filters with YITH WooCommerce AJAX Search to add an advanced search box instead.

Tutorial: How to set up advanced search in WooCommerce

The best way to enhance WooCommerce product search on your online store is by using filter widgets with an advanced search bar. I'm assuming that you're using the YITH plugin for adding advanced search to WooCommerce, but you can equally use WooCommerce Product Table instead.

Step #1: Add a product filter widget

The first thing you need to do is get the WooCommerce Product Filters plugin. Install and activate it on your WordPress site. Once that’s done, follow these steps to add the widget to your WooCommerce store:

  1. Firstly, go to ProductsFilters from the WordPress admin.
  2. Secondly, open or create a group. Fill in the details on the Add new form.
  3. Add the widget on the front-end. To do this, go to AppearanceWidget and drag the Product Filters widget to the sidebar you want it to appear in.

That’s it! You’ve added a product search filtering widget to your online store. You can stop there if that's all you need. Alternatively, you can use the plugin with any of the search plugins we talked about earlier. These will add an advanced keyword search box to your store.

Step #2: Add an advanced search bar

To get started, get the YITH WooCommerce AJAX Search plugin and install it on your WordPress site.

YITH WooCommerce AJAX Search settings
  1. Go to YITHAjax Search from the admin panel to configure the plugin’s settings.
  2. Fill out the General settings, Search settings, and Output settings based on your preferences. The plugin lets you choose which metadata to search and how to display search results on the front-end.
  3. Click the Save changes button to continue.

Customers can use the search box to search WooCommerce, find a product or use the filtering options to narrow down their search.

The best WooCommerce product search plugin

With so many options available, it can be difficult to choose the best WooCommerce product search plugin.

To sum up, my four top picks are:

  • WooCommerce Product Filters **recommended** lets you add filter widgets on your shop and category pages or anywhere in the sidebar. This makes it easy for customers to narrow down their search and quickly find the products they’re looking for.
  • WooCommerce Product Table lets you display products in a neat and organized order form layout with a search box and filters above the table.
  • YITH WooCommerce AJAX Search adds a neat, advanced search to WooCommerce. Use it if you want a better search box without changing your store layout.
  • SearchWP makes the product search widget that comes with WooCommerce more advanced. Use it alongside the search box that comes with WooCommerce Product Table or with WooCommerce itself.

For best results, use your chosen product search plugin with WooCommerce Product Filters. That way, customers have a choice of ways to search WooCommerce and find what they're looking for 🔥

Ready to start enhancing the user experience on your online store by implementing easy-to-use search boxes? Get the plugin today!

2 Comments

  1. Interesting article, I also point out this plugin just released: SF Autosuggest Product Search

    • Hi, Simone. Thanks for your suggestion! I hope it helps other customers who might be looking for alternatives.

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