August 10, 2025
Finding a great WooCommerce plugin is easy. Finding a great free one is much harder, especially for something as critical as search. Too often, free plugins are just a stripped-down teaser for a paid upgrade, lacking the features you really need.
Ajax Search Lite, however, has built a huge following by challenging that idea. It’s one of the most popular free search plugins on the market, but does it truly deliver for a modern WooCommerce store? In this review, we’ll look at both its strengths and its potential weaknesses.
Table of Contents
For a free WooCommerce Ajax search plugin, Ajax Search Lite includes several features to add to your site’s search box.
Here are some of its key features.
As the name suggests, it comes with Ajax functionality, which makes a dropdown appear instantly with relevant product suggestions as users begin typing. This real-time feedback eliminates the need for page reloads and creates a fast and fluid search experience.
Ajax Search Lite can index and search through a much wider range of your product data, including:
The ability to search custom fields is especially powerful for a free tool, as it allows customers to find products based on specific data that would otherwise be ignored.
It lets you display rich, visual information directly in the live search dropdown. This includes product images and description. This gives customers the key details they need at a glance to make quicker decisions.
Ajax Search Lite includes simple and effective filtering options to help users narrow down their results. You can add filter boxes for categories and post types directly above the results list.
To improve the search experience, the plugin integrates with Google to provide autocomplete and keyword suggestions. Once the results are displayed, the plugin also highlights the search terms, making it easy for users to spot the most relevant information.
Ajax Search Lite includes various options, and its backend gives you granular control over your search forms. The settings are organized into clear tabs like General Options, Image Options, and Layout Options, which helps you know where to find the controls you need.
However, its backend has its own distinct visual style that feels separate from the standard WordPress dashboard. Rather than adopting the native interface, the plugin uses its own custom buttons, dated-looking toggles, and layout. It doesn’t blend seamlessly with the core WordPress UI, and the approach feels a bit disjointed and less integrated.
Once you look past the aesthetics, though, configuring the plugin is quite functional. Choosing which post types to include in your search is handled with a simple drag-and-drop interface, and most core settings are controlled with on/off toggles. While the design may not feel modern, the plugin does provide a clear path to setting up a more powerful search experience.
When it comes to customizing the look and feel of your search bar, Ajax Search Lite gives you various options to match the design of your site.
You can start by choosing the search box layout and customizing its theme. The plugin provides a range of color pickers, allowing you to adjust the background, fonts, and icon colors to align with your brand’s palette. You can also adjust details like the placeholder text and the width of the search box from the settings panel.
The plugin also gives you meaningful control over the appearance of the live search results. You can choose whether to display product images next to each result, and customize what information appears in the description.
Beyond visual styling, you can also customize how the search results behave. It lets you control what happens when a user clicks a result. You can select from various options such as opening the results in a new window, scrolling the window to the result list, and much more. You can also enable keyword highlighting, which bolds the search term within the results.
For anything beyond these built-in settings, the plugin supports custom CSS. This gives you the freedom to fine-tune every aspect of the design for a truly seamless integration.
Ajax Search Lite’s performance is a story of two sides: instant front-end feedback versus potential back-end strain.
From the customer’s perspective, the plugin feels fast. Its core live AJAX functionality delivers results as the user types. It also helps by caching product images, ensuring the visual results load quickly without a noticeable delay.
However, it’s important to understand how the plugin works under the hood. Ajax Search Lite relies on the standard WordPress database query system, which is not optimized for the kind of complex searches that eCommerce requires. For stores with thousands of products, this can lead to significant slowdowns.
Beyond backend performance, Ajax Search Lite also offers control over its front-end performance. You can fine-tune or completely disable animations, which is a great way to improve performance, especially on less powerful devices. It also lets you optimize how its assets are loaded. You can choose to load minified JavaScript, defer it to the footer to prevent render-blocking, and even disable specific scripts for features you aren’t using. This gives you granular control to reduce page weight and improve your overall site speed.
Ajax Search Lite, as the name suggests, is a free version of the Ajax Search plugin. It’s available to download via the WordPress repository.
Ajax Search Lite is compatible with most WordPress and WooCommerce setups.
The plugin automatically replaces your theme’s default search bar. While this works well for many popular themes, it’s not a guarantee for every single one. Fortunately, you always have other options, as you can easily add the search form anywhere using its shortcode, widget, or the included Gutenberg block.
When it comes to compatibility with WooCommerce, it is not as deep as you’d expect. It’s able to recognize your products as a searchable post type, but it doesn’t provide deeper integration to search product areas such as variations, SKUs, price, and others.
However, it plays well with other essential plugins. It offers full support for multilingual tools like WPML, Polylang, and QtranslateX. It also integrates smoothly with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and popular page builders like Elementor.
After a detailed look at the plugin, we can finally address the final question: Is Ajax Search Lite the right plugin for your WooCommerce store?
For a free plugin, Ajax Search Lite delivers on its promise of bringing a live search experience to your storefront.
However, this accessibility comes with clear trade-offs. The backend interface feels dated and disconnected from the native WordPress UI, which can make the configuration process feel less intuitive. More importantly, it doesn’t provide deep integration with WooCommerce, which makes it not fit for stores.
Its performance architecture also relies on the standard WordPress database, which can struggle under the weight of a large product catalog, leading to slower search times as your store grows.
1. What is an Ajax search?
An Ajax search is a live search that shows results instantly as you type, without needing to reload the page. It uses modern web technology to fetch data in the background and makes the search experience more interactive for your customers.
2. Is Ajax Search Lite free?
Ajax Search Lite is completely free and can be downloaded from the WordPress repository. It provides a basic feature set at no cost. For those who need improved performance for large stores or more advanced filtering, a premium version, Ajax Search Pro, is also available.
3. How to create a WooCommerce product filter with Ajax?
The most effective way to create an Ajax WooCommerce filter is by using a specialized plugin. Plugins like FacetWP offer an easy way to add filtering to your store. They allow customers to refine results by category, price, or attributes instantly, without waiting for the page to reload.
4. How to add WooCommerce SKU to the search query?
The default WooCommerce search does not include SKUs. The best way to enable this is using a search plugin like SearchWP or Advanced Woo Search. They can be configured to search within custom fields, which allows them to index and find products based on their SKU.
5. How do I improve product search in WooCommerce?
The most significant improvement comes from using a dedicated Ajax search plugin. A plugin like SearchWP or Advanced Woo Search replaces the default search with a live, AJAX-powered experience and can search SKUs, attributes, and custom fields, making it far easier for customers to find products.
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