WOOF (HUSKY) Products Filter vs Super Speedy Filters

Choosing between HUSKY, the plugin most people still call WOOF, and Super Speedy Filters comes down to one question: how big is your catalogue going to get, and how much do you care about what Google does with your filtered pages.

Last updated: 28 July 2026.

Overview of HUSKY (formerly WOOF)

HUSKY is one of the best-known filter plugins for WooCommerce, and deservedly so. The free edition on wordpress.org has over 90,000 active installations and holds 4.6 out of 5 from 335 reviews, which is a lot of people getting what they wanted. It filters by category, attribute, tag, custom taxonomy, meta field and price, refreshes results over AJAX, and recounts the remaining options as you go.

Where it stands out is the building experience. It ships a front-end form builder so you can assemble the filter panel on the page itself, a Smart Designer for custom elements, a step-by-step setup wizard, and an extensions system covering colour and image swatches, SKU and text search, taxonomy range sliders, hierarchy dropdowns, on-sale and in-stock checkboxes, and ACF field filtering. The Professional version is $49 as a one-off single-site purchase under Envato’s licence terms, with no annual renewal.

It also has its own answer to large catalogues, called Turbo Mode, which the authors describe as preventing “the generation of large MySQL queries during product filtering”. A user running a 40,000-product shop reviewed it in January 2025 saying it “is working perfectly”, so it is not as though HUSKY falls over the moment a store gets big.

Visit HUSKY Products Filter →

What the two have in common

More than the marketing on either side suggests. Both filter WooCommerce archives by category, attribute, tag, custom taxonomy, price, stock status and on-sale state. Both filter on arbitrary post meta. Both update results over AJAX without a page reload, show counts beside each option, support multi-select within a filter, and offer colour swatches and images on attribute terms. Both are actively maintained and both have real support behind them.

If your shop has a few thousand products and a handful of attributes, you will be happy with either, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

Where they actually differ

The thing that gets counted. Every filter panel has to answer the same question before it can draw itself: for each of these terms, how many matching products are there, given everything already selected? WordPress answers that with joins across term_relationships and the posts table. That works fine until it does not, and the point at which it stops working is somewhere between a big catalogue and a lot of attributes.

Super Speedy Filters does not ask that question of WordPress’s tables at all. The performance add-on maintains its own mirror table, fww_object_ancestors, that is shaped for exactly this lookup and nothing else. It is rebuilt on a schedule into a staging table so the live one never goes down, it supports category trees up to ten levels deep, and there is a wp ssf rebuild CLI command when you want to force it. Filter queries hit that table instead of the join.

Two more layers on top of that. Rendered widget fragments are cached to disk above a configurable size threshold, so a heavy widget is only built once. Term data goes through the WordPress object cache, so on Redis or Memcached the busier the site gets, the more of the work is already done. And any filter can be set to render immediately but defer its query until the visitor opens, hovers or expands it, so twenty filters in a sidebar do not all compete for the same page load. There is also an Apply button widget if you would rather batch the whole selection into one query.

SEO on filtered archives. This is the part buyers underestimate and then get bitten by. Filtered pages multiply: every combination of every attribute is a crawlable URL, and left alone they will eat your crawl budget and generate thin duplicates. HUSKY generates SEO-friendly filter links. Super Speedy Filters goes considerably further, and this is where most of the paid product lives:

• readable filter paths such as /product-category/jeans/color/black/ instead of query strings, including multi-term paths like /color/black/green/
• canonical URLs on filtered pages, configurable per attribute
• index and follow control per attribute, so brand pages can rank while colour combinations stay out of the index
• an automatic noindex and nofollow below a result-count threshold you set, which is the standard defence against thin filtered pages
• templates for the page title, the on-page H1 and the meta description on filtered archives, with real Yoast integration, including an option to leave clean category pages entirely to Yoast and only take over once a filter is active
• per-URL overrides that set the browser title, the H1 and the meta description, and inject arbitrary HTML above and below the product grid, matched either to one exact URL or to any URL containing chosen terms
• filter-aware breadcrumbs, and filtered subcategory tiles that only show the subcategories that actually contain matching products

That last one is the difference most people miss, so it is worth being concrete. HUSKY’s rules can set a filtered page’s title, H1 and meta description. What they cannot do is put content on the page. Super Speedy Filters lets you write full HTML above and below the results for any filtered URL, or for every URL containing a given term. So when you find that /product-category/dogs/brand/dogsrus/colour/white/ is quietly pulling in search traffic, you can turn that exact combination into a real landing page with a proper introduction, buying guidance and internal links, without building a page, without a builder, and without touching the archive template. Every filter combination is a potential landing page, and thin filtered archives are the single biggest reason they do not rank.

How you build the panel. HUSKY gives you a visual front-end builder and a wizard. Super Speedy Filters uses standard WordPress widgets, twelve of them, configured in the widget admin, plus an inline mode that renders filters in the results area rather than a sidebar. If you want to design the panel visually, HUSKY’s approach is nicer. If you want to configure it once and move on, ours is fine.

How you buy it. HUSKY Pro is $49 once, for one site. Super Speedy Filters starts at EUR 49 per year for one site, EUR 79 for five, or EUR 279 for a five-site lifetime licence, with a 60-day money-back guarantee, a 30% renewal discount, and the plugin continuing to work after a yearly licence lapses. On price alone HUSKY is cheaper, and I am not going to argue otherwise.

Feature comparison

What their own users say

The most useful positive review is from thpapag on 23 January 2025: “I am using it in an eshop with 40K products and is working perfectly. Support replied to all my requests in less than 24 hours.” That is a real user at real scale, and it is the strongest argument for HUSKY on this page.

The most substantial criticism is from Vanderbeam on 18 June 2024, titled “An accessibility lawsuit waiting to happen”: “they misuse nearly every user interface object possible, making it an incredibly poor experience for keyboard and screen reader users.” If you have accessibility obligations, that review is worth reading in full before you commit either way, and worth testing yourself rather than taking anyone’s word for it.

On our own side there is a customer who made exactly this switch, and you can read him in the reviews below. The line that matters is that WOOF was fine for him until he reached about ten attributes. That is the honest summary of when the change is worth making: it is not really a product count, it is an attribute count.

When HUSKY is the better choice

If you are starting out, install the free version. It costs nothing, 90,000 sites are running it, and if it is fast enough on your catalogue then you have your answer and you have spent nothing to get it. If you want a visual builder, if $49 once is the budget, or if you need ACF filtering out of the box, HUSKY is a straightforwardly good buy.

When Super Speedy Filters is the better choice

When the filter panel has become the slow part of your category pages, and adding attributes makes it worse. When you have tens of thousands of products, or you are heading that way and would rather not rebuild later. And when you need real control over how Google treats your filtered archives, because canonical, index and follow control per attribute, plus an automatic noindex threshold for thin pages, is not something you can bolt on afterwards with an SEO plugin.

Switching

There is no data migration. Filters are configuration, not content, so moving over is a matter of deactivating one plugin, adding the Super Speedy Filters widgets to your sidebar, and letting the ancestors table build once. Nothing is written to your products, and nothing has to be undone if you change your mind. If you are on a large store, run the initial table build before you switch the filters over, because that first build is the one operation that scales with catalogue size.

What I would tell a buyer

I wrote Super Speedy Filters because Scalability Pro could not fix filtering from the outside. Filtering is a counting problem, and you cannot make counting fast by caching around it, you have to change what gets counted. That is the whole idea, and it is the reason the gap widens with catalogue size instead of staying flat. On a small shop you will not notice it and you should not pay for it. On a big one it is the difference between a category page that works and one that does not. — Dave Hilditch

Frequently asked questions

Is HUSKY the same plugin as WOOF?

Yes. WOOF was renamed to HUSKY – Products Filter Professional for WooCommerce. Same author, same wordpress.org listing, same plugin.

Is HUSKY fast enough for a large store?

It can be. There is a public review from a user running 40,000 products who says it works perfectly, and HUSKY ships a Turbo Mode aimed at large catalogues. The honest answer is that it depends on your attribute count as much as your product count, and the free version means you can find out on your own catalogue before spending anything.

Why is Super Speedy Filters faster on big catalogues?

Because it does not use WordPress’s term_relationships joins to count matching products. It maintains its own mirror table shaped for that lookup, rebuilt on a schedule, and queries that instead. Rendered filters are also cached to disk, and individual filters can defer their query until the visitor opens them.

Does Super Speedy Filters have a free version?

Not currently. There is a 60-day money-back guarantee instead, so you can test it properly on your own store and get a refund if it is not right for you.

Can I use both?

You can, but you should not. Two filter plugins fighting over the same archive query is a support problem you do not need. Pick one.

Further reading

Related products

Super Speedy FiltersFast product filters and pretty, indexable permalinks on every archiveSuper Speedy SearchSpeeds up front-end and wp-admin searchScalability ProSpeed up your whole site – big catalogues, big databases, no re-architecture