The Best top 10 Search Plugins for WordPress

Free Plugins

Better Search

Search through posts, pages, and custom post types. Help visitors search by assigning greater weight to titles or post content. Results can be sorted by relevance or date.

The site user can track popular searches with a “search heatmap” widget added to the sidebar or footer. In addition, search terms are highlighted in the results to allow for easier browsing.

WP Extended Search

With this plugin, users can search post meta, categories, tags, or custom post types. They can search by the post author’s name and include or exclude certain post types from the search.

They can also choose to exclude old content posted before a certain date specified by the site administrator. The site administrator can also choose the number of search results shown on the results page. This plugin provides a lot of useful options for customization, making it a plugin worth checking out.

Search Everything

This highly-rated plugin can be configured to search pretty much everything, pages, excerpts, attachments, drafts, tags, comments, and more. It gives users a search option without modifying template pages. This makes it an easy answer for those looking for a better search engine.

Search Everything also has a unique feature, a writing helper called “Research Everything” that allows you to search for content and easily link it to your posts while writing.

WP Ultimate Search

WP Ultimate Search supports autocompleting. Users can quickly search through multiple taxonomies including categories, tags, and look for specific text. With the option to narrow down results, this plugin makes searching quick and simple, especially with sites where a text-only search won’t work.

Search both post titles and content. Link search queries with Google Analytics. Users can even search multiple categories at the same time, speeding up the search process.

The results of searches are shown in the form of a customizable template. This function allows users to create a results format they love. This is a plugin users have been raving about.

Dave’s WordPress Live Search

Here’s another highly-rated free search plugin. The main feature of this plugin is that it gives your site a “live” search function, meaning results pop up as users type, not on a separate results page. This allows users to see instantly whether the terms they have entered are giving the result they’re looking for.

The live search feature uses Javascript, but if visitors don’t have Javascript, the search function returns to the default.

Premium Plugins

Search Improvement Console Plugin for WordPress

This WordPress Search Improvement plugin is aptly named. It offers four tools to improve your website search.

• Ban Search – If a visitor searches for a certain term, his/her IP will be instantly banned
• Redirect – Whenever a user searches for a certain word in the search bar, he/she will be redirected to an internal URL
• Replace – Replaces certain words that are searched. For instance “quetion” can be corrected to “question”
• Suggest – The search box will present live suggest based on what what the user is searching

Enhance your WordPress search engine behavior and direct users to relevant pages. Includes autocomplete, term redirect, term replacement and a complete search log.

Relevanssi

This highly-rated and popular plugin has both a free and premium version. The free version has many basic functions, including searching by relevance, matching partial words, use OR/AND to search multiple terms, and highlight search results in content.

Users can also search comments, tags, categories, shortcode content, and custom fields. If a search term is spelled incorrectly, it will ask “Did you mean?” and show successful searches, as Google does.

The premium version has many more features. It supports multiple sites and adjusting weight by post date, taxonomy, and post type. To compare free and premium versions of this plugin, see this comparison table.

Relevanssi is also developer-friendly and includes many hooks to change and modify search results easily. By using the hooks, you can develop categorized search, add some basic NLP functionality, and much more.

Live Search Filter

The WordPress Live Search plugin excels at what it does and also has one differential: back-end live search.

The back-end search means fast search filter to tables or lists on your admin Back-End dashboard, no matter from which plugin they come from.

Fast Live Search Filter

The Live Search Filter plugin adds a live search filter to elements on your posts or admin dashboard. The plugin comes with predefined Admin Dashboard filters for the plugins, pages, posts, comments and user dashboard. Have instant filter results on your WordPress site.

Ajax Search Pro

This plugin is perhaps the most customizable of the bunch, with more than 250 backend options. It comes with four different layouts to display results in a visually-appealing manner. You can go with the more traditional results page, or display results as snapshots.

Ajax Search Pro creates a search option that is responsive, autocompletes, and supports multiple sites. It has many options to customize search fields with checkboxes, sliders, and designate where search results are pulled from. This can be especially useful for ecommerce sites.

Search and Filter Pro

Last but not least, Search and Filter Pro. This plugin allows users to search posts, products, and custom post types. There are many ways to filter search results by meta data and taxonomies.

With this plugin, you can create as many search forms and results pages as you’d like with an easy drag and drop feature. Display a search form anywhere in pages or themes using widgets or shortcodes. This plugin works well with many of the major ecommerce systems, such as Woocommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.