Why You Need the Best WordPress Search Plugin
The reasons why you need good navigation / search on your WordPress or WooCommerce site is fairly obvious. We the people of the 21st century are an impatient bunch. When your site users can’t find what they are looking for– quickly– they get irritated and leave your site. This results in higher bounce rates and lost sales.
WPspring.com has many of the very best WordPress search plugins available. However, picking the right plugin to tame that search is not as easy as you might think!
We hope this guide will help.
Post Categories,Product Categories & Attributes, Oh My!
The taxonomies you have chosen to build your site will determine the best WordPress search plugin for you. For instance, let’s say you have mainly used product categories to assign the kind of categories your users will want to ‘search’ and ‘filter’ by. In this case, a plugin based on searching attributes will not be the best search tool for your customers.
An example:
Let’s say you sell toys. You have reserved ‘product attributes’ for features that describe variations of your product that people can choose to buy (like color or size) or for product specifications (“manufacturer”) or age ranges (“ages 7-10”). You might not want to include categories like “building/construction toys” or “puzzles & games” in your toy attributes. However, a customer browsing your store would definitely be interested in limiting a search to these categories when they are shopping. Plus, there are a lot of benefits to using “product categories”
Product categories are a fantastic built-in features of WooCommerce. For instance, using product categories you can create a menu item that points to a page that dynamically displays all products assigned to the ‘puzzles & games’ category. BUT, any WordPress search plugin that filters only based on ‘attributes’ will not meet your toy shoppers’ needs.
You could not use the otherwise awesome WooCommerce Ajax Layered Navigation Extension for your toy store. Why? Because this plugin only allows searching based on product attributes– not product categories.
Choose a the best WordPress search plugin based on the taxonomy you have used on your site.
WooCommerce Ajax Layered Navigation Extension
Ajax layered navigation will give your customers a sophisticated navigation that rivals big brands like Amazon. Especially good for…products that have color and size attributes.
- Search by attribute only
- ‘Drill down’ searching—When your customer searches for ‘t-shirts’ then clicks color ‘red’, results will be limited to red t-shirts. Clicking on ‘red’ after searching on ‘t-shirts’ will not retrieve a list of all products in the store with the ‘red’ attribute.
- And/Or: support for both query types
- Widget support
WooCommerce Product Finder Plugin
Top-notch, multi-faceted, advanced product search form for your WooCommerce site!
- Search by attributes AND product categories, keyword, price slider and more!
- Widget support
WooCommerce Product Search Plugin
Power up your product search! This plugin delivers instantly instant results as your visitors type their search.
- Search will give priority to specific products and product categories (you define)
- Based on search keyword matches in product titles, excerpts, contents and tags.
- Widget support