August 10, 2025
When choosing a search plugin, you often face a trade-off between features and simplicity. Some plugins offer deep control but come with a steep learning curve, while others are easy to use but lack flexibility.
Ivory Search aims to find the perfect balance between these two extremes. It’s a popular plugin that allows you to create highly customized search forms. In this article, we’ll take a close look at its features to see how well it delivers on its promise for a growing WooCommerce store.
Ivory Search gives you the features to create highly specific search experiences for different parts of your site.
Let’s look at the key features that make it powerful and flexible.
Instead of a single, site-wide search setting, Ivory Search allows you to create an unlimited search forms, each with its own unique rules. For a WooCommerce store, this means you can create a search bar for your “Sale” page that only shows discounted items, or a search form on a brand page that is limited to that specific brand’s products.
This ‘many forms’ approach is its biggest differentiator, making it a powerful tool for complex sites with diverse content needs. However, for a typical WooCommerce store that just needs one powerful, perfectly-tuned product search, this flexibility can be overkill. A dedicated plugin like Elevated AJAX Search might feel more focused, as it puts all its energy into perfecting that single, crucial customer touchpoint.
Ivory Search can look for matches in places the default WordPress search completely ignores. It can index:
Like other WooCommerce search plugins, Ivory Search also includes an AJAX search that provides live, as-you-type suggestions in a dropdown below the search bar. This allows customers to see relevant products without waiting for a page to reload.
Ivory Search adds several smart features to help deliver more accurate results and reduce no results found pages:
Just as important as what you search is what you don’t search. Ivory Search gives you full control to exclude specific content from results. For a store, this is incredibly useful. You can easily configure a search form to hide out-of-stock products, certain product categories, or specific items you don’t want to promote.
To help you understand what your customers are looking for, Ivory Search can track search behavior and integrate with Google Analytics. This allows you to see what terms are popular and, more importantly, what people are searching for but not finding.
When you create your first custom search form, Ivory Search presents you with a well-organized interface. The settings for each form are broken down into logical tabs like Search, Exclude, and Design on the left side.
This makes it clear where you need to go to control what gets searched versus what the form looks like. Most options are simple toggles and dropdowns, so configuring a basic search is quite intuitive.
When it comes to customizing the look of your search bar, Ivory Search makes things simple by using a familiar interface. The Design tab opens the native WordPress Customizer, where you can easily change colors, button text, and other visual elements. Like Classic themes, it gives you a live preview of your changes, which removes the guesswork and makes it easy to match your website’s style.
Once you’ve configured your form, you get multiple options to add it to your website. You can add it to any menu with a single click, place it anywhere with a shortcode, or use a widget to add it to the sidebar. Many modern plugins, like Elevated AJAX Search, now offer a more integrated experience, where all controls are on a single screen with an instant preview, creating a more fluid and cohesive workflow.
Using the native WordPress Customizer is a smart choice for familiarity, but in an era of real-time, single-page admin panels, this approach can feel a bit dated.
Ivory Search includes various customization features that give you control over both the look of the search form and the way results are displayed. As previously mentioned, it uses the native WordPress Customizer to allow easier customization.
It starts with several pre-defined styles for the search bar itself. You can choose from a standard search box, a minimal form, or even a form with an icon. This allows you to select a layout that best fits your site’s header and overall website.
For fine-tuning the visual details, Ivory Search lets you easily change colors and button text, all while seeing a live preview of your changes.
The customization extends to the live AJAX results. You have control over what information appears in the dropdown, such as showing or hiding product images and controlling the length of the description. You can also add a custom loader animation and change the text box background.
For anything beyond these built-in options, you can always apply your own custom CSS for complete design control.
Ivory Search is a lightweight plugin. At its core, it uses an inverted index-based search engine. In simple terms, this is a much smarter and faster way to organize and retrieve data compared to the default WordPress search.
From a user’s perspective, the performance boost comes from its AJAX live search. It shows results instantly as a user types, which creates a fluid and responsive experience.
You also have direct control over performance by being able to exclude content. The more precise you are about what gets indexed, the smaller the index, and the faster the search.
Ivory Search offers flexible pricing plans, with a capable free version. The free Starter plan is a great entry point, while the most powerful WooCommerce features are reserved for the two premium tiers.
Here’s a breakdown of what each plan offers:
| Plan | Annual Price (Starts At) | Lifetime Price (Starts At) |
| Starter | Free | Free |
| Pro | $19.99 / year | $99.99 |
| Pro Plus | $49.99 / year | $189.99 |
It’s also worth noting that both the Pro and Pro Plus also come with 5 and 25 site licenses. For any growing WooCommerce store, the Pro Plus plan is the most logical choice.
Ivory Search is built to integrate smoothly into most WordPress environments. The plugin completely replaces the default WordPress search and works well with the vast majority of modern themes.
It has been tested with popular options like Divi, Avada, GeneratePress, OceanWP, X, and Pro by Themec,o and many more.
For WooCommerce, Ivory Search offers full compatibility and allows you to create custom product search forms that can scan SKUs, attributes, and variations.
Beyond that, Ivory Search also integrates with other popular plugins. It supports multilingual search through WPML, Polylang, and Weglot, which is essential for international stores. It also works with bbPress, making it a good choice for sites that have community forums alongside their main content.
After a detailed look at Ivory Search, it’s clear that it’s a powerful and flexible plugin for taking control of your website’s search function. It lets you create unlimited, independent search forms, which makes it a perfect solution for a complex website where a single, site-wide search isn’t enough. Its use of the native WordPress Customizer for styling is also a thoughtful touch that lowers the learning curve.
So, what’s the potential downside? Even in premium versions, Ivory Search can index file names (for PDFs, documents, etc.) but cannot index the actual content inside those files. If your site needs to make the content of PDFs or documents searchable, you’ll need a more advanced plugin.
1. How to use the Ivory Search plugin?
After installing Ivory Search, you can create a new search form from its settings menu. It lets you configure what it searches like posts, products, or custom fields. Then, you can easily display the new form anywhere on your site using a shortcode.
2. How do I improve product search in WooCommerce?
The best way to improve product search in WooCommerce is to use a plugin like Ivory Search. It allows you to add AJAX functionality to your search form and search product information such as attributes, custom fields, and even SKUs. This makes it much easier for your customers to find exactly what they’re looking for.
3. What is the best Ajax search plugin for WooCommerce?
For a modern store, a plugin like Elevated AJAX Search is the best choice. It provides a fast, live search experience and gives you deep control over the design from a single settings page. This allows you to create a premium, user-friendly search bar that perfectly matches your brand without needing any code.
4. How do I add a search to my WordPress menu?
While some themes have this option built in, a plugin like Ivory Search simplifies it. It allows you to create a custom search form and then provides a simple toggle option in its settings to assign that specific search form directly to any of your navigation menus.
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