Top 5+ Most Efficient WordPress Filter Plugins
When a visitor comes to your website, he wants to find what he needs as fast as possible. In case he has to go through several menus, browse several pages to find what he came for, chances are he will give up and go to some other site to try his luck. An efficient filtering functionality, therefore, is essential for a good user experience and the easiest way to add it to your website is to use a quality WordPress filter plugin.
There are many different types of WordPress filter plugins, some of them are more convenient for an online store, others are better for blogs but the good thing is you can surely find great WordPress filter plugins both free and premium. Before making your choice, it is also a good idea to understand the main difference between free and premium WP plugins, as well as how WP plugins work in general.
In this article we’ll take a closer look at some of the best WP Filter plugins so that you can easily find the one that will answer your needs perfectly:
If you are running a WooCommerce store and need an advanced product filter functionality, JetSmartFilters plugin may be a good choice. It is made to work seamlessly with Elementor and Gutenberg which makes customizing the filters easier.
This plugin comes with a sorting filter, visual filter, radio filter, search filter, select filter, alphabet filter, and many other filtering features.
Thanks to the Indexer features you can let the customers find the desired products in just one click that will show all the relevant search results. It is also possible to apply multiple filters on a single page and use AJAX to do it quickly.
This is a premium plugin with prices starting at $24.
Search & Filter is a very beginner-friendly search and filtering plugin that anyone can use regardless of their website type. It allows performing the search per tag, category, taxonomy, post date, post type, and also per any combination of these. If you are planning to use it on your blog, you can remove the search box and use it as a filtering system for your pages and posts.
The plugin lets you display the fields as checkboxes, dropdowns, multi-selects, or radio buttons. You can also create custom search fields, use ajax to display results,, and create as many fields and search fields as you need. You can also insert search fields anywhere on your website using shortcodes and widgets.
Better Search is a free WordPress filter plugin that is a great choice for bloggers and similar types of websites. It replaces the default WP search engine with a search engine that provides results relevant to the title and content of the post so that your visitors can find what they need faster. This tool can also perform a search through pages and all other custom post types.
Additional options for refining the results by assigning bigger weight to the title or content also come with the plugin. As for the design, the default version matches seamlessly with any theme and more advanced users will be able to customize it even further using various templates. Plus, all the searches are tracked by the plugin so that you can also get a search heatmap of the most common searches on your site.
Relevanssi is another free WordPress filter plugin that is very user-friendly and comes with lots of configurable options. It allows your users to perform searches using just partial words, one search term as well as using search phrases, complete words, and quotes.
The search results will not be sorted by date but in the order of relevance. The only thing you should be careful about if you choose to go with Relevenssi is that it may require large amounts of database space, so you have to be sure your hosting setup offers enough space.
WordPress Meta Data Filter & Taxonomies Filter is easy to use and can be configured quickly. It uses meta fields and taxonomies to make your website searchable and filterable. It is made to be used for searching posts and custom post types on a WordPress website through taxonomies and metadata fields at the same time. It can also be used for WooCommerce stores as it comes with a very rich set of filter elements.
All these features are included in the free version, and the plugin also offers a premium version with many more advanced options.
Ivory Search is a powerful WordPress filter plugin that will efficiently replace the default WordPress search. With it, you can create custom search forms, each with its own custom search settings. This way, you can have multiple search forms across your website.
Ivory Search accesses post types, images metadata, custom fields, and similar content on your site to improve search results. It also works well with WP multilingual plugins as well as with WooCommerce plugin so you can also use it for your online store.
If you are running or plan to run a WooCommerce store, Ajax Search for WooCommerce is an excellent choice. The main reason why this plugin is a good choice for your store is that it allows instant fetching of search results using Ajax without reloading a page.
With this tool, you can easily add a product search to any store page and product category. A powerful product SKU search, as well as category and tag filters all, come with this tool. Implementing them in the sidebar or navigation menu or any other place is easy.
All these features are included for free and the premium version comes with more features and advanced functionality.
In Conclusion
Filtering and search functionality are some of the most essential features that define the quality of the user experience on our website. Therefore it is important that you carefully consider what kind of filtering and/or search functionality your users would appreciate the most and make the best choice of the filtering plugin accordingly. We made sure this list offers lots of free choices, and many of the plugins also have a premium version in case you, later on, decide you need more advanced features.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!