Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
Get Super Speedy Search →Comparing WooCommerce Default Search with Super Speedy Search? 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 Default Search
WooCommerce ships with its own product search that queries the WordPress database using SQL LIKE clauses. It covers basic title and description matching and is available out of the box with no configuration required. For smaller catalogues it is functional, but it does not support relevancy ranking, typo tolerance, SKU search, or custom field queries.
How Super Speedy Search differs from WooCommerce Default Search
All plugins from Super Speedy Plugins share a SQL-first architecture and an uncompromising focus on performance — and Super Speedy Search is no different. Here is what sets it apart:
Super Speedy Search brings fast and relevant search results to your users and your oft-forgotten site admins. Don’t pull your hair out with basic search which matches too many things, and doesn’t sort them properly.
Our search weights are fully customizable, and we even have our own custom-coded ajax handler to bring ULTRA-fast ajax to your WordPress website.
How to choose between WooCommerce Default Search and Super Speedy Search?
The built-in WooCommerce search is a reasonable starting point for small shops, but as your catalogue grows, the absence of relevancy scoring, SKU search, and synonym handling begins to hurt conversion rates. Super Speedy Search replaces the default search with a SQL-first engine that prioritises the results customers actually want to find — tested against one-million-product catalogues and available via a free trial so you can see the improvement without any financial commitment.
What do others say about Super Speedy Search?
Incredible woocommerce search plugin, performs great, support is fast if needed, and integrates well into my theme.
This is precisely the search plugin you need for your WooCommerce website. It performs well with our 50,000+ product catalogue. Support from Dave and his team has been excellent and any issues are resolved quickly. Thats 5 stars from me!
After using 2 other plugins from Super Speedy Plugins, our choice for a new search plugin easily fell to Super Speedy Search: fast and immediate support and of course amazing speed! I also use Scalability Pro and Infinite Scroll, so when our previous search plugin provider raised prices 50-fold, we needed a new search plugin. Knowing that this existed, it was a quick and painless switch to Super Speedy Search as it would also improve back-end search, something we were struggling with as with about 35.000 products it wasn't always as fast as we wanted it
Super Speedy Search Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →- How to add extra meta fields to Woo Product Admin search
- How to check if Super Speedy Search is working
- How to format dates in Ultra Ajax output
- How to get Super Speedy Search working with other search forms
- How to hide or show items in search results
- Search is slow when using WooCommerce Tab Manager
- Styling Super Speedy Search Form
- Adjusting Super Speedy Search Weights
- Ajax Search Panel – Super Speedy Search Settings
- Getting Maximum Speed from Super Speedy Search
- How to add the Super Speedy Search widget into your header
- Installing and configuring Super Speedy Search
- Main Super Speedy Search Settings
- Meta Search – Super Speedy Search Settings
- Narrowing Super Speedy Search results with filters
- How to increase the search ranking position of search phrases with short tokens
- Super Speedy Search settings page is slow to load or times out, or there are too many meta keys on the SSS settings page
- The fulltext index fails to create on wp_posts
- The Super Speedy Search form is displaying above hover menus
- Upstream sent too big header
Articles about Super Speedy Search
View all articles →- Bug fix sprint
- December Development Update
- Manual update for Super Speedy Search required
- More speed, more updates, and a bit of a roadmap for our plugins
- More beta updates available
- Beta downloads and historic plugin versions now in your account
- Upgrades to multiple Super Speedy Plugins plugins now in beta
- Dev Diary #7
- Dev Diary #2
- Update to Super Speedy Search released
What's new in Super Speedy Search?
5.48 (6th March 2026)
- Added new elevated search privileges option to Additional Options tab so admins can choose which other roles get to see private and out of stock items all the time
- Added common meta key exclusions to Meta Search query to avoid flooding admin tab with useless meta keys no-one will ever want to search
5.47 (4th March 2026)
- Added language column to terms table for polylang taxonomy suggestions – table rebuild required to use new fix
- Improved polylang integration
- Added admin auth cookies to Ultra ajax to allow admins to search private items from ajax
- Altered ajax to detect user permissions to allow admins to search private items from ajax
- Added SSS_VERBOSE mode for additional debug logging when debug log enabled and define('SSS_VERBOSE', true); in wp-config.php
- Updated ajax search so that stock checks are ignored for admins
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
Get Super Speedy Search →
