November 7, 2025
The WooCommerce search space is crowded with plugins that have been around for years. While they work, many carry the baggage of dated interfaces and incremental updates. Elevated AJAX Search is a new plugin that combines a fast, modern search engine with granular design controls.
In this review, we’ll take a closer look at how this new plugin handles the details that actually matter to your customers.
Table of Contents
Elevated AJAX Search comes with a clean, modern interface that gives control in your hands without overwhelming you. All settings are arranged on a single page, which makes it easy to fine-tune the search engine with minimal work.
Let’s explore some of the features that make this WooCommerce AJAX search plugin stand out.
The plugin searches across multiple product fields, not just titles. You can enable searching through product descriptions, short descriptions, SKUs, attributes, categories, and tags. You can also enter custom field values if they contain key specs. This means that whether a customer remembers a product name, a color, or even a part number, they can find it.
Unlike many competitors, Elevated AJAX Search offers extensive customization through a clean, organized settings panel. You can adjust the search bar’s appearance with simple controls, customize result layouts, and even configure what information displays in each section.
Whatever changes you make to the settings, they appear instantly in a preview window. This allows you to see exactly how your search will look before saving.
You have complete control over what appears in the search results. You can easily choose to show or hide product images, prices, descriptions, and SKUs. The plugin also includes options for styling result items with borders, padding, and custom colors, allowing you to create results that match your brand.
Elevated AJAX Search includes features for fine-tuning your search behavior. You can exclude out-of-stock products, set fuzzy matching modes, and even add custom filters to narrow down results. There’s also an option to search in custom fields, making it flexible for stores with specialized product data.
Elevated AJAX Search prioritizes simplicity, and this shows immediately when you install the plugin. Everything is contained on a single page rather than spread across multiple tabs or sections, which makes navigation straightforward and intuitive.
When you first open the settings, you’re greeted with a clean dashboard. The left side displays all your configuration options organized into collapsible sections. The right side shows a live preview of your search bar and results, so you can see how changes affect the look in real time.
Most settings are controlled with simple toggles and sliders. To adjust the minimum number of characters before search triggers, you drag a slider. To show or hide product images, you flip a toggle. To change a color, you click a color picker. This approach means you don’t need to hunt through dropdown menus or figure out confusing options.
The product preview section works similarly. You can toggle “Show Product Preview” on or off with a single click, then adjust the styling of borders, image sizes, and button appearance through straightforward controls. Font sizes for different elements like titles and prices are adjusted with number inputs, making it easy to get the exact sizing you want.
One particularly helpful feature is that you can adjust settings on the left and immediately see the result on the right. Change a color, and it updates in the preview. Adjust the padding, and the preview refreshes. This eliminates the frustrating cycle of saving, checking the front end, and coming back to adjust.
Elevated AJAX Search offers extensive design customization options, allowing you to make the search bar and results look like a natural part of your store without needing custom code.
You can start with the Basic Settings section, where you control the fundamentals. You can adjust the search bar’s maximum width, making it narrow and focused or stretched across the full page. You can also choose layout options like the standard search bar or a minimal-looking one with an icon. The “Show Submit Button” toggle lets you add a dedicated submit button for visitors to click on before the search bar returns a result.
The Input Styles section gives you control over the search field’s appearance. You can change the input background color and text color independently, ensuring the search bar stands out or blends in depending on your preference.
For the results dropdown, you get various options to customize what visitors see. You can adjust the maximum number of results displayed using a slider, set custom text for the “No Results” label, and control padding around the results area. You also get options for background color, padding between items, and even the hover background color for result items.
The Typography & Colors section provides granular control over text styling. You can set font sizes separately for section labels, product titles, prices, SKUs, and descriptions. Each element has its own color control, allowing you to create a visual hierarchy. For example, you can make titles bold and prominent while keeping descriptions in a lighter gray.
For product images, you can add borders, choose the border color, adjust the border width, and set the border radius for rounded corners. This level of control ensures product images fit your design language, whether you prefer clean edges or softer, rounded presentations.
Apart from all these customization options, you also get various toggles to decide what information appears in the results.
Performance is critical for a search plugin, and Elevated AJAX Search uses several techniques to ensure results appear quickly.
At its core, the plugin builds an optimized index of your product data. Rather than querying your WordPress database every time someone searches, Elevated AJAX Search stores a processed version of your products in a dedicated index. This index is specifically structured for fast retrieval, which means search queries execute much faster than they would against the regular WordPress database. When you hit the Force Index Rebuild button, the plugin regenerates this index, ensuring your search stays current with your latest product changes.
The live AJAX feature also contributes to perceived speed. As it displays results as soon as the customer types, the search feels instantaneous.
The plugin also gives you options to optimize performance further. You can control how many results display at once using the “Max Results” slider. Showing fewer results means faster rendering and a cleaner user experience.
The fuzzy matching feature, while useful for user experience, can impact performance on very large stores. Elevated AJAX Search lets you adjust the fuzzy matching level, which gives you control over the balance between accuracy and speed based on your store’s size and server resources.
Elevated AJAX Search is a premium plugin with straightforward, transparent pricing. All plans are billed annually, with the exception of two special lifetime plans. What’s great about this pricing is that all features are included, and plans vary based on the number of licenses required.
Here’s a breakdown of the available plans:
| Plan | Price | Sites Included |
| Single Site | $49/year | 1 website |
| Up to 5 Sites | $99/year | Up to 5 websites |
| Up to 100 Sites | $249/year | Up to 100 websites |
| Lifetime Deal | $149 (one-time) | 1 website |
| All Access Pass | $199 (one-time) | Unlimited websites |
Elevated AJAX Search is specifically built for WooCommerce and works seamlessly with the WordPress ecosystem. It integrates smoothly with virtually all major WordPress themes and plugins, so you don’t have to worry about conflicts or compatibility issues derailing your search setup.
The plugin works with all popular page builders and Gutenberg. It gives you a shortcode that makes it easy to place your search bar anywhere on your site.
One of its strengths is its support for custom fields. If you’re using plugins like Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) or other custom field plugins, Elevated AJAX Search can index and search that data. This is particularly valuable for stores with specialized product information.
For WooCommerce, it doesn’t require any special setup and works out of the box.
After a detailed look at Elevated AJAX Search, it’s clear that the plugin is a perfect choice for the modern store owner who values deep, granular customization through a clean, modern, and genuinely intuitive dashboard.
This focus on a seamless admin experience is no small detail. Features like the live preview eliminate frustrating trial-and-error, while the unified single-page admin panel makes the entire configuration process feel effortless.
But this thoughtful design is combined with a fast, index-powered engine, resulting in more than just a search box. You get a refined shopping experience that removes friction and guides customers effortlessly from search to sale.
1. What is the best search plugin for WordPress?
Elevated AJAX Search is the best and most powerful search plugin available. It offers a fast, index-powered engine and a clean, intuitive interface, providing a powerful yet user-friendly experience for any store owner.
2. How do I add search to WooCommerce?
The best way to add a powerful search to your store is with a dedicated plugin. A modern plugin like Elevated AJAX Search simplifies this process, letting you add a fast, live search bar with a simple shortcode and providing a seamless integration out of the box.
3. How to improve WooCommerce search?
The most effective way to improve your store’s search is with a dedicated plugin that indexes all your product data properly. A plugin like Elevated AJAX Search replaces the default with a fast, live AJAX experience and searches SKUs and attributes, which dramatically improves accuracy and helps customers find products faster.
4. Why is my WooCommerce product search not working?
This issue is common because the default WooCommerce search often ignores critical data like SKUs or product attributes, leading to inaccurate results. A plugin like Elevated AJAX Search solves this problem by creating its own reliable index of all your product data, ensuring your customers always get relevant matches.
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