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Best WooCommerce Product Filter Plugins of 2022

Danielle Di-Tommaso
March 2, 2022
best woocommerce filter acsell character

Do you want to convert more website visitors into customers? For most WooCommerce store owners, the answer is an obvious and definite “Yes!” One way to do so is to make your customers’ lives easier by offering a better buying experience.

Cue, WooCommerce product filters.

If you’re looking to create a more streamlined, intuitive, and enjoyable shopping experience, it’s time to start using the best WooCommerce product filters for your online store. 

As you may have already guessed, these make your products more searchable and easier to find, making your eCommerce store more accessible for shoppers to navigate and find the products they’re looking for.

In light of that, we’re revealing the top five product filter plugins for WooCommerce and providing a step-by-step tutorial on creating professional product filters for your WooCommerce store.

What Are WooCommerce Product Filters and Why Should They Matter to You?

Product filters are meant to make navigating your online shop’s inventory easier and should help your customers with product discovery. Namely, by enabling shoppers to find the products they’re looking for quicker. These searches should even empower customers to search for specific product attributes, such as:

  • Size
  • Color
  • Brand
  • On sale or promotion

Interestingly, up to 30% of eCommerce visitors use internal site-search, and those searchers are more than 2-3x as likely to convert. The natural conclusion? An intuitive site search aided by product filters could boost your revenue, which is why picking the right plugin for this functionality is essential.  

The 5 Best WooCommerce Product Filter Plugins on the Market

WordPress has an elementary built-in filter system with limited functionality. However, a third-party solution is often your best bet to get the most out of product filters and site searches. 

The only problem?

Thanks to the sheer array of options out there, choosing the best WooCommerce product filter plugin is a daunting task. That said, we hope to make this decision a little easier by rounding up some of the top choices.

1. Acsell Product Filters

Acsell Product Filters enables you to build advanced fast filtering into your WooCommerce site- without needing coding skills or hiring a developer. One of its main advantages is its in-browser fast filtering. In other words, users don’t have to refresh the page to get instant results for a quicker purchasing journey.

More specifically, it gives access to the following filter options:

  • Products
  • Featured products
  • Stock
  • Attributes
  • Product tags
  • Price

…and even by sales!

What makes Acsell stand out from other WooCommerce filter plugins is that it enables filtering within the browser. This reduces the number of server calls so that filtering occurs near-on instantly. Users just select their filter preferences, and items appear which meet their product criteria. In short, it’s a speedy, user-friendly solution that enables customers to find products faster than ever before. 

Acsell Product Filters Top Features

  • There is a 7 day FREE trial. 
  • Acsell is the fastest filter plugin on WooCommerce.
  • Easy setup with no coding required – very beginner-friendly.
  • You can have different filter groups for every category page of your website.
  • You can choose multiple filters, including product, tags, price, sale, and product attribute. 
  • You have control over the UI and can add dropdowns, sliders, checkboxes, switches, swatches, and brand images.
  • The Acsell “Config Wizard” walks you through the setup in minutes. 
  • Order your filter options through a simple drag and drop filter builder.
  • Enterprise level solution for a plugin price.
  • There is a free demo available with over 10,000 products which shows the plugin’s power and velocity within a realistic ecommerce environment – this is very rare. 
  • Multi-site license available. 

Acsell Product Filters Advanced Features

But that’s not all. Acsell have really thought about UX and also provides:

  • Acsell is optimized for mobile and desktop use. 
  • Acsell boasts instant filtering “behind the scenes” visibility with dynamic product counts. These show which category or price range is being filtered.
  • You can use advanced logic conditions including ‘and’ ‘or’ statements to distinguish independent filters.
  • You can create unique dropdown menus by grouping different attributes using logic conditions (this is a feature seen with no other plugin).
  • “Featured” status displays only those products that need extra promotion or showcase new additions in real-time.
  • Highly flexible in that you can select the page loading type i.e. Pagination, Load More or Infinite Scroll. The baymard institute suggests that ‘Load More’ is best practice. 
  • Return to the same place with all filter options maintained, so customers can continue their journey from where they originally left off – no more scrolling. 
  • You can create unlimited filter sets and global filter sets.

2. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter

YITH is another popular WooCommerce product filter plugin that enables your customers to quickly find the products they’re looking for. 

Customers benefit from filter options like:

  • Size
  • Color
  • Categories
  • Tags
  • Taxonomies

..and more. 

You can customize the filter style to match your WordPress themes. Additionally, YITH’s product filter plugin lets you show filters on custom pages, like those created with page builders like Gutenberg or Elementor. You can create unlimited filters for specific product categories and product pages and display filters on a vertical or horizontal bar.

YITH for WooCommerce

YITH Top Features

  • A free version is available.
  • You can display category images in a visually appealing filter system.
  • The filters come with default presets to help you get up and running quickly.
  • You can use widgets, shortcode, or a Gutenberg block to easily add the filters to your site.
  • You can showcase filters in a modal view optimized for mobile devices.

3. Advanced AJAX Product Filters

This free plugin allows you to add unlimited filters from the convenience of a single widget, including:

  • Attributes
  • Price filter
  • Tags
  • Categories

The paid plan (from $49 for 1 website license) gives you:

  • Custom taxonomies
  • Subcategories 
  • Min and max price slider

It also comes with a range of sliders, buttons, and checkbox styles, so you can easily customize your product filters to suit your brand. However, unlike Acsell, this plugin requires shoppers to hit an ‘update’ button before retrieving any search results.

Advanced AJAX Product Filters Top Features

  • There are plenty of ways to customize filters.
  • SEO-friendly URLs.
  • You get access to the intuitive drag and drop filter builder.
  • Filter visibility by product category and attributes such as gender, color, size, origin, country, and more.
  • You can create unlimited filters.
Ajax Product Filter

4. WOOF

WOOF is a flexible product filter for WooCommerce. You can set filters for customers to choose from on your site so that they can quickly locate the products they’re looking for, including:

  • Categories
  • Product attributes
  • Tags
  • Size
  • Price

…and more.

You can easily embed filters onto your site using the plugin’s product shortcodes and widgets. With the premium version of the plugin, you can also add advanced filter choices like a taxonomy search module. This allows users to search by color, picture, meta filters, SKUs, labels, etc.

WOOF Top Features

Lots of inbuilt extensions including:

  • Search by text so customers can search for specific products in the search field
    • Search by SKU so customers can see how many items of a particular product are in stock 
    • Hierarchy dropdowns, so customers can choose to view filtered products in different hierarchies such as price low to high, price high to low, sort by product popularity, sort by latest product added, and so on. 
  • You can collect internal site search data.
  • You can set conditional filters.
  • In-stock checkbox where customers can see the products in stock.
  • On-sales checkbox customers can only see products you’re currently offering on sale.
  • Shoppers can filter by product rating.
  • There’s a free live demo available.

5. Themify – WooCommerce Product Filter

Finally, many users are fans of Themify’s product filter for WooCommerce. This plugin lets you create filters for price range, categories, product attributes, tags, and many more. It’s unique because it allows website visitors to apply several filter combinations simultaneously (as Acsell does) so that customers can trim their search down to exactly what they’re looking for.

Users also don’t have to reload WooCommerce shop pages to view their search results. Not to mention, you can create an unlimited number of search forms using the drag-and-drop builder, and it’s SEO-friendly.

All in all, it’s one of the most intuitive WooCommerce product filter plugins on the market.

Themify Top Features

  • Users can apply as many filters as they like in one search.
  • You benefit from real-time search updates.
  • You get access to an intuitive drag-and-drop search form builder.
  • Website users can select to see products either in a vertical or horizontal layout.
  • This plugin works with Divi, Elementor, and Themify Builder’s product modules.

The Easiest Way to Set Up a Woocommerce Product Filter: Use Acsell

Now that you have an overview of what’s on the market, we’ll walk you through how to set up one of the most feature-rich and user-friendly plugins available: Acsell. 

Acsell’s ease of use doesn’t only put it above other plugins; it also offers plenty of tools to ensure the most customer-centricity. Most notably, Acsell doesn’t require users to update or refresh the website page or filters to find what they’re searching for. Instead, as you type in your query, live search results populate for immediate results. 

Also, thanks to its configuration wizard, Acsell’s pretty easy to set up. The wizard will walk you through configuring your product filter, so you can have a filter set up within minutes.

Step 1: Create your Acsell Account. At the time of writing, you can sign up for free to enter a draw to receive the plugin for free. Once you’ve created an account and chosen a plan, you’ll receive an API key.

Step 2: Navigate to the sideboard inside your WordPress dashboard. Find “Plugins” and click “Add new.” In the directory, search for Acsell and click “Install Now,” followed by “Activate.”

Step 3: Find the Acsell plugin amongst your WordPress plugins and open its settings. You’ll be prompted to enter the API key you just received with your Acsell account.

Enter your license key to activate Acsell

Step 4: After this initial setup is complete, you can use Acsell to configure your product filters. Follow the configuration wizard’s on-screen instructions to help you set up and start using unlimited filters and setting smart conditions. 

Expert Tips for Choosing the Best WooCommerce Product Filter

Before we wrap up, here are a few best practices for choosing the right product filter plugin for your site:

  • Consider your product specifications: You need to enable users to filter products according to specific information. For instance, if you’re selling phone cases, you may want to ensure customers can search by model number, size, special features or parts, etc. Or, if you sell clothes, users may wish to filter by size, color, style, season, etc. Whatever your product specifications, make sure you pick a plugin that accommodates your unique filter needs.
  • Ensure the plugin doesn’t hinder your website’s speed: This is vital for good UX and SEO. Incidentally, Acsell is one of the fastest-loading filter plugins on the market.
  • Pick a plugin that allows users to use a combination of filters: This is especially important if you’re selling lots of different items and variations. Simple searches might otherwise turn up hundreds of results and leave users stranded in too many choices.
  • Find a solution optimized for mobile viewing: Most users browse products using mobile devices, so this is a must!

Bonus: Using product filter plugins can potentially improve your end user’s experience. A whopping 42% of major eCommerce websites don’t offer category-specific product filtering for some of their core products. 

Not only that, but 32% of eCommerce sites don’t allow users to apply multiple filter values, so if you do opt for a product filter plugin, you’re ahead of the game. This is where a solution like Acsell comes in handy because shoppers can return to the same place with all the selected filters maintained after clicking away.

Are You Ready to Use The Best WooCommerce Product Filter Plugin for Your Site?

As we’ve seen, product filters are great for providing customers with a much-improved user experience. Not least because they go a long way to helping them find the product they’re looking for, and as a result, you’re much more likely to make a sale! 

Convenience pays off, so it’s worth investing in the best WooCommerce product filter plugin for your site. Acsell has all the features you need to provide customers with quick and easy internal filtering. So, what are you waiting for? Sign up today to enter a draw to receive the plugin for free!

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