Want to know what is better, SearchWP or Ivory Search?
Choosing the right search plugin for your WordPress site is an essential step to ensure your online success.
In this article, we made a detailed review of these two plugins, compared their features, ease of use, quality of support, and price plans to help you choose the best one.
Here is a table of content to help you navigate through this comprehensive comparison:
Let’s begin!
Overview
First, let’s take a brief look at both of these plugins to get a better understanding of what they are.
SearchWP
SearchWP is a powerful and easy-to-use plugin using which you can take complete control of your search.
It has an intuitive interface that allows you to quickly customize how search works on your site, even if you’re a WordPress newbie.
With Search WP, you can choose where WordPress should search for matches, manage the order of search results, make tags and custom fields searchable, and many more.
Over 30,000 WordPress website owners already use SearchWP to enhance their search and deliver more relevant content to their visitors.
Ivory Search
Ivory Search is another great WordPress search plugin that allows you to make your search smarter and improve your content visibility.
It’s easy to use and has plenty of features to customize your search to meet your business needs.
For example, using Ivory Search, you can create unlimited search forms, exclude specific pages from search results, make WordPress search for media files, and more.
Ivory Search is trusted by over 70,000 WordPress site owners and has a free version with limited functionality.
Features
After we’ve got acquainted with the plugins, let’s take a look at their features and see which one offers more of them.
SearchWP
SearchWP is packed full of features using which you can enhance your search, deliver more relevant search results to your visitors and grow your business.
Advanced Search
First, with SearchWP, you can make almost everything on your site searchable.
This list includes post and page tags, categories, formats, custom fields, and other attributes.
Plus, you can make WordPress index content of PDF files and documents you upload to your site.
Secondly, using SearchWP, you can control where and how WordPress should look for matches.
For example, you can limit search results to a specific type of content, such as posts.
Or make WordPress only consider page titles when performing a search.
You can also edit the relevance weight of various search source attributes to control which ones WordPress should give the highest priority.
Plus, you can add rules to your search engine to automatically exclude content from search results by its attributes, like categories, tags, and more.
SearchWP also allows you to add multiple search engines that you can link to specific search fields on your site.
This way, you can create different custom search fields to meet your business needs and deliver the most relevant results to your visitors.
WooCommerce Integration
Another SearchWP feature that sets it apart from other plugins is the seamless WooCommerce integration.
Due to it, you can make search in your store smarter in a few clicks.
For example, you can make WooCommerce product attributes searchable to make it easier for your customers to find the right products.
Or, you can limit search on your site to WooCommerce products only to clean up your search results from redundant pages.
It’ll help your customers to find what they’re looking for faster and increase the number of your sales.
Search Tracking
SearchWP gives you detailed reports on your visitors’ search behavior and lets you see what they’re looking for on your site.
Using this valuable information, you can adjust your marketing and content strategy to grow your business and drive more traffic from search engines.
For example, you can see which search results are the most popular, how many searches visitors make on average, and many more.
Control Over the Search Results Order
With SearchWP, you can manually edit the order of search results on your site.
It allows you to prioritize specific posts, pages, or products to promote them and get more pageviews.
You can also exclude specific posts or pages from search results with a single click.
Thanks to these SearchWP features, you get better control over your search results and give your visitors more accurate matches.
Live Autocomplete Search
Another awesome SearchWP feature is a live autocomplete search. With it, visitors can get instant search results and faster navigate your site.
It improves their user experience and encourages them to make more searches and view more of your content.
Automatic Theme Integration
SearchWP automatically integrates with your search results page and every search form existing on your site.
It’s also fully compatible with the most popular page builders, such as Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder and more.
Due to that, you can start customizing your search immediately after installing the plugin, regardless of what WordPress theme you use.
That’s very helpful for beginners and allows you to give your visitors a better search experience without writing a single line of code.
Ivory Search
After getting familiar with SearchWP features, let’s move on and take a look at Ivory Search features.
Unlimited Search Forms
Like SearchWP, this plugin also allows you to create multiple custom search forms and place them across your site using shortcodes.
This is a useful feature that helps you to boost your content discoverability and encourages your visitors to search more.
For example, if you own a cooking blog, you can add a customized search form that only searches among recipes in your posts.
Or, if you’re an eCommerce store owner, you can quickly increase your sales by putting a customized search form in your showcase posts.
Search Images, Media, Attachments & Files
Another thing you can do with Ivory Search is to enable on your site search for various media files, post attachments, PDFs, and office documents.
WordPress doesn’t consider media files by default when performing searches, so this is a good opportunity to enrich your search results.
WooCommerce Compatibility
Like SearchWP, Ivory Search also has a WooCommerce integration allowing you to ensure better product search for your visitors.
Thanks to it, you can make product taxonomies such as tags and categories searchable, enable search by SKU, and more.
Since a robust search is essential for every online store to succeed online, this feature is invaluable for WooCommerce site owners.
Exclude Anything From Search
As SearchWP, Ivory Search gives you the ability to exclude specific posts, pages, or categories from search results on your site in a couple of clicks.
This is a super helpful feature, as it allows you to get rid of redundant pages in search results and help your visitors find the right content faster.
Live AJAX Search
Ivory Search also allows you to display search results on your site in real-time, just like SearchWP.
In addition, you can customize how the search results look. For example, you can manage the length of the description, add or remove images, author info, and more.
Ease of Use
One of the key points to consider when choosing a plugin is how easy it is to set up and use.
Let’s make a comparison of how easy it is to use SearchWP and IvorySearch to see which plugin is most beginner-friendly.
SearchWP
SearchWP has a simple and modern-looking interface that you can easily navigate, even if you’re a WordPress beginner.
All plugin features are intuitively grouped into 4 tabs, allowing you to customize how search works on your site in a few clicks.
On the Engines tab, you can manage the settings of your search engines, edit the list of their search sources and attributes, add rules, and more.
Then, on the Settings tab, you can manage the list of your stop words that WordPress will ignore when performing searches to give more relevant search results.
On the Advanced tab, you can enable and disable various advanced SearchWP features on the Advanced tab, such as fuzzy search, “Did you mean?” corrections, highlighting terms in search results, and more.
Finally, on the Support tab, you can open a ticket to get fast and comprehensive support from the SearchWP support team.
To sum up, SearchWP is super easy to use and allows you to quickly enhance your site’s search without being technically savvy.
Ivory Search
Ivory Search has a slightly overwhelming interface, which can be difficult for beginners to navigate at first.
But after you spend some time studying it, you’ll see that it has almost the same set of settings as SearchWP.
For example, in the Search tab, you can configure what types of posts you want WordPress to search among, manage searchable attributes, and more.
In the Exclude tab, you can choose specific posts, pages, or categories you want to exclude from search results on your site.
In the Design tab, you can use a built-in search form customizer to change the appearance of your search form.
You can enable live AJAX search on your site and manage how it works in the AJAX tab. For example, you can choose which page parts should be shown in search results, edit the length of the search result description, and more.
Finally, in the Options tab, you can enable and disable some advanced features, like keyword stemming, fuzzy matching, search term highlighting, and more.
Customer Support
Another important point worth paying attention to is the plugin’s customer service.
The quality and speed of support responses directly affects how effectively you can use the plugin.
With that said, let’s see which plugin has the best support service, SearchWP or Ivory Search.
SearchWP
SearchWP has an outstanding support team that you can easily contact via the ticket system right from your WordPress dashboard.
The average response time is only a few hours, so you can count on getting help very quickly.
Plus, there are SearchWP knowledge base and blog full of comprehensive guides and tutorials on how you can customize the plugin to meet your business needs.
Ivory Search
Ivory Search offers 2 ways to get support, depending on whether you have the free or premium version of the plugin.
You can get priority support via email if you’re a premium user. The average response time is about a day.
For free users, there is a forum where you can ask questions, but you should be aware that it may take a few days to get an answer.
Ivory Search also has a knowledge base that contains a bunch of useful step-by-step guides on how to use the plugin.
Pricing
The last but not the least thing to consider when choosing a WordPress search plugin is the price.
Let’s compare the SearchWP and Ivory Search pricing plans to find out which plugin offers the best value for money.
SearchWP
SearchWP comes in 3 pricing plans that differ in the number of features and included addons.
Let’s take a closer look at them:
- Standard plan. License for 1 site. Costs $99 per year and comes with all standard features and extensions.
- Pro plan. License for 5 sites. Costs $199 per year and includes all the standard features plus an expanded set of extensions, including Metrics, Redirects, Custom Results Order, Related Content, and WooCommerce Integration.
- Agency plan – License for an unlimited number of sites. Costs $399 per year and includes all the standard features plus an expanded set of extensions, including Metrics, Redirects, Custom Results Order, Related Content, and WooCommerce Integration.
All plans include free support through a ticketing system and updates during the license period.
Plus, if for any reason you’re not satisfied with SearchWP, you can get a refund within 14 days without any questions.
Ivory Search
Ivory Search also comes in 3 pricing plans, among which you can choose.
Here they are:
- Starter plan. License for 1, 5, or 25 sites. This is the free plan that includes all standard features, like creating unlimited search forms, excluding specific content from search, and more.
- Pro plan. License for 1, 5, or 25 sites. Starts from $19.99 per year and includes all features of the Starter plan plus a number of premium features, like managing search results order, adding authors to search results, and more.
- Pro Plus plan. License for 1, 5, or 25 sites. Starts from $49.99 per year and includes all features of the Starter plan plus a number of premium features, like managing search results order, adding authors to search results, and more.
Ivory Search also offers a refund within 30 days of purchase if you encounter an issue with the plugin that the support team cannot resolve.
Our Verdict
After comparing the features, ease of use, customer support, and pricing plans of both plugins, we’re ready to announce the winner.
We think that SearchWP is the best and most versatile WordPress search plugin based on its easy user interface and the number of features.
With this plugin, you can get complete control over search on your site and customize it to meet your business needs regardless of your technical skills.
Namely, using SearchWP, you can:
- Display your search results in live mode
- Control the order of search results
- Prioritize specific pages in search results
- Exclude specific pages, categories, or content types from search results
- Add multiple search engines and create custom search fields
- Track searches of your visitors and collect various data on their search behavior
- Make WordPress consider post tags, categories, and custom fields when performing a search
- Make the content of PDF files and documents you upload to your site searchable
- And more…
Over 30,000 website owners already use SearchWP to enhance search on their site and deliver the most accurate search results to their audience.
Ready to join them? You can get started with SearchWP here.
From this article, you learned which WordPress search plugin is better, Ivory Search or SearchWP.
We hope this comparison will help you make the right decision and choose the best search plugin to help you grow your business.
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