WooCommerce Layered Nav vs Super Speedy Filters

Dave Hilditch •

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Performance Tip

The measured result changes with catalogue size and cache state. WooCommerce core recorded the lowest averages in our 10,000-item test. At 100,000 simple products without Redis, Super Speedy Filters averaged 257.100 ms on the first pass and 208.672 ms of PHP render time, compared with WooCommerce core at 740.000 ms and 670.097 ms. With Redis warm, WooCommerce core recorded the lowest second-pass TTFB. Read the complete 100,000-product benchmark.

Comparing WooCommerce Layered Nav with Super Speedy Filters? This page breaks down the key differences and similarities so you can find the best fit for your WordPress or WooCommerce store.

Overview of WooCommerce Layered Nav

WooCommerce Layered Nav is the built-in attribute filtering widget that ships with WooCommerce. It adds sidebar filters based on product attributes and allows visitors to narrow down products by options like colour, size, or material. It is available at no extra cost and requires no additional plugin to install.

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How Super Speedy Filters differs from WooCommerce Layered Nav

All plugins from Super Speedy Plugins share a SQL-first architecture and an uncompromising focus on performance — and Super Speedy Filters is no different. Here is what sets it apart:

Every filter click should feel immediate, even when the catalogue is large. Super Speedy Filters cuts expensive taxonomy work, updates products and filters together, and keeps crawler-heavy filter combinations away from WordPress.

WooCommerce Layered Nav uses standard WordPress queries that run through the full WP_Query stack — functional for small catalogues but increasingly slow as product count grows. Super Speedy Filters bypasses that stack entirely with dedicated SQL tables, allowing filter queries to return in milliseconds even on catalogues with hundreds of thousands of products. It also adds AJAX updates, range sliders, price filters, and SEO-friendly URLs that the native widget does not offer.

How to choose between WooCommerce Layered Nav and Super Speedy Filters?

The built-in WooCommerce layered navigation is a reasonable starting point, but it does not scale. As your catalogue grows, filter queries get slower and the feature set stays static. Super Speedy Filters is built from the ground up for performance, with dedicated SQL tables and a SQL-first architecture tested against one-million-product catalogues. A free trial is available to see the difference on your own store.

What do others say about Super Speedy Filters?

★★★★★
wsthff — November 2020

Hi Dave, the plugin is great, very fast and highly customisable. Would be great if it was compatible with Yith Brands Add-on. We have many brand pages and would like to use filters on brand pages as well, such as filter by categories and attributes, which is very important for a e-commerce site.  REGARDS

★★★★★
Daniel Antoniów — September 2021

It's nice to look at the website after turning on this plugin, instant filtration of products even on pages with a huge amount of them. The plugin gives conditional display of filters, e.g. if we want a filter to be visible in a given place only, i.e. after selecting a category or taxonomy field, it will appear only when we select any category, which products are assigned to this category and there is at least one assigned to this product attribute . In addition, you can change the SLUG quickly, i.e. the link does not have to be the same as the filter name, we can choose another. It's worth using. I spent a lot of time finding this plug and testing others in the market. I am currently stating that it is the # 1 plugin for filtering products on WooCommerce among the others. The top ones are often limited to e.g. 100,000 products, but filtering is also slower than this FWW plugin.

★★★★★
RENE JAKOB — September 2021

We were looking for a filter plug-in that was compatible with our shops with 30-70 thousand products. Until then, no other filter was able to process such quantities satisfactorily and fulfil our wishes. Due to our good experiences with wpintense (Scalability Pro), we took Dave at his word and installed the plugin. Particularly noteworthy are Dave's tireless improvements and first-class support. Almost all wishes are answered immediately and a solution is sought and found. The filter plugin is also therefore able to filter extensive shops extremely quickly and reliably. We are thrilled with the performance of the filter and the wpintense team! Of course we will now buy the "lifetime" licence.

What's new in Super Speedy Filters?

6.66.0 (22nd October 2026)

  • Fixed Fragment AJAX leaving the Active Filters chips on screen after the last filter was removed.

6.65.0 (22nd October 2026)

  • Fixed the Active Filters widget showing no chip when the only filter is a brand or tag, so it could not be removed.

6.64.0 (21st October 2026)

  • Faster filter counts on attributes with the per-variation stock check, and on any count filtered by one, once the object-ancestors table is rebuilt (queued automatically on update).
  • Faster filter counts on Super Speedy Search results.
  • Fixed search results with Show Filtered Variations listing a product once per matching variation when Super Speedy Search shows one result per product.
  • Search results now follow the stock check (hide out of stock), as filtered archives do.
  • Fixed filter counts on a search that matches only a product's variation, such as a variation SKU, showing no options.
View full changelog →

Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Filters on your store.

Get Super Speedy Filters →

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