Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. Purchasing a product through one of these links generates a commission for us at no additional expense to you.
One of the best ways to boost your sales is to make your store easier to use.
With an Ajax search bar powering your WooCommerce store, visitors will be able to find products faster than before. And if you add in Ajax product filters, they can navigate through tens of thousands of products to exactly the one they want in a matter of seconds.
There’s no question about it, live search results drastically improve the user experience.
If you’re ready to add this awesome feature to your store, keep reading to find the best WooCommerce Ajax search plugins to get the job done.
Important: adding Ajax search to your site makes for a better user experience, but is much more demanding on your server. You might want to consider switching to a host that can handle dynamic, high-performance WooCommerce stores, such as LiquidWeb.
Best WooCommerce Ajax search plugins
There are a few plugins available to add Ajax search to WooCommerce. In this collection, you’ll find the very best options with details on how they’re different and who should choose them.
Make sure to check out the demos and screenshots offered by each plugin as you review your options.
Here are my top picks for the best WooCommerce Ajax search plugins.
1. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search
Plugin Description
YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search is a full-featured plugin for offering live search results on your WooCommerce store.
When a shopper searches in WooCommerce, the normal experience is to be taken to a page of search results. With this plugin installed, they’ll immediately see recommendations below the search bar as they type. You even have the option to show the product thumbnails, prices, descriptions, and sales tags to make it easier for customers to choose which products they want to click on.
In addition to adding an Ajax search bar to your WooCommerce store, this plugin also improves the quality of the search results. It does this by allowing you to include the product descriptions, excerpts, categories, and tags in the criteria when pulling up relevant results. These small adjustments can lead to much better suggestions for shoppers.
Overall, this is an awesome plugin and will integrate well with any store that needs a WooCommerce live search plugin.
2. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter
Plugin Description
While offering live search is a powerful way to enhance your store’s user experience, it might feel incomplete if only your search bar updates instantly. Another way to improve your store is to make the product filter options powered by Ajax too, and that’s exactly what this plugin does.
With the YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter plugin, you can add options to your store that let customers filter by brand, color, size, price, and more. Instead of waiting for a full page reload, shoppers will see the new results instantly. This pairs really nicely with the Ajax product search plugin by YITH listed above.
The filter options themselves look really nice and have a superior design to the default WooCommerce filter widgets. They also let you customize the preset values and include block versions that can be embedded inside posts and pages.
You might be happy with just Ajax-powered search, but if you want your filters to update instantly too, this will be an excellent addition to your store.
3. WooCommerce Product Search
Plugin Description
WooCommerce Product Search is an awesome plugin and an amazing value since it costs less than the YITH plugins above and includes both Ajax search and Ajax product filters.
The main feature of this plugin is that customers will see the search results update instantly as they type. You can show the products in a modal right below the search bar or update the shop page with the new results as they type. And as mentioned already, all of the WooCommerce filters become Ajax-enabled, so they’ll update the store page immediately upon selection.
One unique feature of this plugin is that it includes a full statistics dashboard. Seeing what your customers are searching for and how often each search term is used is extremely useful for learning what to promote in your shop.
While the functionality in WooCommerce Product Search is excellent, the design is not quite as nice. The search suggestions and filters look okay, but the ones in the YITH plugins look much better. This can be fixed easily if you know some CSS or have a developer that can make style improvements for you.
4. Ajax Instant Search
Plugin Description
Ajax Instant Search is a simple WooCommerce Ajax search plugin. It lets you add a search bar to your site that presents results in a modal window as the user types. The products featured in this way include their thumbnail image, price, excerpt, and even an Add to Cart button.
The search bar also includes a few filtering options. Shoppers can choose between searching the whole store or a specific product category, and there’s a select option to switch to searching the entire website, including blog posts and other pages.
Since Ajax Instant Search needs to output its own search bar, it comes with a shortcode that you can copy and paste anywhere on your site. However, it would be better if there was a widget as well, which can be added easily to a sidebar. Overall, it’s a solid plugin but doesn’t have quite as many features as similarly priced search plugins listed in this collection.
5. DHWC Ajax
Plugin Description
DHWC Ajax is an extremely affordable and simple plugin for adding Ajax product search results to your WooCommerce store.
The major difference between this plugin and some of the others is that it doesn’t offer live search results. For example, the other plugins listed above will pull up product suggestions as the user types. This plugin won’t do that. Instead, it waits until the user hits the Enter key like a normal search bar, then reloads the products only instead of doing a full page reload. While this is nicer than the standard search results, it may not be that much faster than reloading the whole page, depending on the speed of your website.
DHWC Ajax also includes the same functionality for your filters, which means visitors can apply both search terms and filters together to update the store results. The ability to combine these tools allows your shoppers to rapidly navigate through a large product catalog.
Which live search plugin is best for your store?
So which plugin will you select for your store?
YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search offers a unique combination of comprehensive functionality and excellent style, making it a top choice to quickly set up Ajax search on your store.
WooCommerce Product Search is more affordable and also includes Ajax product filters and search analytics, but the UI doesn’t look quite as nice.
Ultimately, the decision is up to you, but I hope this detailed collection of the best Ajax search plugins for WooCommerce helps you to choose the perfect new plugin for your store.
Thanks for reading and please consider sharing this article with the social media buttons below.
