When your WordPress site gets bogged down with tons of old articles dating back from years ago, it’s time to find a way to search for them for not only your regular visitors but for newbies. There may be some great material from a few years ago that you’d love your site visitors to find but it’s buried somewhere and they don’t know what it was called. 

Your visitors need a powerful search feature to allow them to find specific posts. The default WordPress search feature is not going to cut it and you need to simplify this process by helping your visitors sift through hundreds and thousands of old posts. There are now a few awesome plugins that will enhance this feature for you and make searching more functional. Here is a look at the top plugins for WordPress site searches. 

<h2>Better Search</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/BetterSearch.png" alt="Better Search" width="771" height="250" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8939" />

If you want to supercharge your search, install <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search/">Better Search</a>, the new way to replace your default with a search engine that gives contextual results by relevance. This is not the most enhanced search option out there but it will add more functionality to your site’s search. 

Your visitors will be able to see the most relevant results based on title and content and it will be much quicker than the default. You can customize the output too. Then you can check your “heat map” to see what the most popular searches are which is displayed on the theme’s footer or sidebar. Enjoy features like a profanity filter, automatic replacement of the default search, and highlighted search terms in the results list. 

<h2>Relevanssi</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Relevanssi.png" alt="Relevanssi" width="753" height="240" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8941" />

Probably the most popular choice for plugins is <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/relevanssi/">Relevanssi</a>. It’s the most widely used plugin that people are choosing to replace the default search feature. Your visitors can now search based on partial results, they can search based on relevance or date and they can search using Boolean expressions. Try the phrase search with quotation marks and get results with excerpt displays, highlighted search words, a query log, a “Did you mean?” feature like Google and support in multiple languages!

<h2>Dave’s WordPress Live Search</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/DavesWordPressLiveSearch.png" alt="Dave&#039;s WordPress Live Search" width="750" height="229" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8940" />

If you love searching for something and have instant results as you’re still typing, you’ll love <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/daves-wordpress-live-search/">Dave’s WordPress Live Search</a>. The plugin written by a guy named Dave will search the database while your visitor is still typing and starts displaying a sorted list of posts matching the words as they are typed. 

They will continuously refine based on your visitor’s continued typing making it called a “live search.” Your visitor will need JavaScript to use it but if they don’t have it, they can still use the default search. This plugin is the choice for over 10,000 websites.  

<h2>Ajax Search Pro For WordPress</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/AjaxSearchProforWordPress.png" alt="Ajax Search Pro for WordPress" width="615" height="325" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8938" />

Lastly, check out <a href="http://codecanyon.net/item/ajax-search-pro-for-wordpress-live-search-plugin/3357410">Ajax Search Pro for WordPress</a>, a more sophisticated option that you’ll love on your site. it has a small premium to use it but the search results will bring up images and can pull up any type of result including WooCommerce products. Ajax stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript And XML” which basically means that the plugin will perform the search without needing to refresh the page. 

Enjoy a variety of displays from horizontal to isotopic and over 60 themes for each layout. You’ll have widgets to allow you to display the latest searches or most popular searches. Enjoy benefits like search statistics, performance tracking, multisite support, keyword suggestions and integration with Google Analytics. 

These are the best plugins for WordPress to make your search function much more user friendly. Your visitors will love the added feature and seeing the improvement from the default search they were once used to. 