Ivory Search vs Super Speedy Search
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
Get Super Speedy Search →Comparing Ivory 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 Ivory Search
Ivory Search is a free WordPress search plugin that replaces the default search with an advanced search form. It supports searching posts, pages, custom post types, WooCommerce products, and custom fields.
How Super Speedy Search differs from Ivory 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:
The fastest search for WordPress and WooCommerce, and the most relevant. Super Speedy Search returns results in as little as 0.2 seconds on a million-product store, with suggestions appearing instantly as your customers type and smart weighting that puts the right products first. It runs entirely on your own server, so there are no Algolia or hosted-search fees, and it speeds up every search in wp-admin too. Built for big catalogues, from a few thousand products up to 500,000+ posts.
How to choose between Ivory Search and Super Speedy Search?
Choosing between Ivory Search and Super Speedy Search comes down to how seriously performance at scale matters to your business. Super Speedy Search was built from the ground up with a SQL-first architecture, and every release is benchmarked against a one-million-product WooCommerce store before it ships — the kind of rigorous testing that surfaces the performance issues other plugins quietly ignore. A free trial is available so you can see the difference on your own staging environment before committing.
What do others say about Super Speedy Search?
Amazing plugin to create comprehensive and the fastest search for WP. It looks great and does exactly what the information says it will! After testing many pro search plugin, we found that SuperSpeedSearch was the only that could handle the amount of our products (300k+)! The support we received was fantastic–very timely and helpful! Any question & problem we’ve had has been answered & resolved. We were looking for a very advanced plugin and this plugin has helped us do just about everything we were looking for and more. Keep going wpintense team!!!
I have been using Scalability Pro (also made by WP Intense) for a good few years now with no complaints and recently added Super Speedy Search and their Super Speedy Filters to our site. Super Speedy Search is working great on our site which has a hundred or so products, but the products have quite a lot of variations on them. Previously loading the full search results page was getting quite slow. Now with Super Speedy Search, when the customer hits enter or clicks to see all of the products from their search results it displays that page much quicker than any other plugin we have used previously. I'm very pleased with this, it is like some sort of performance wizardry! Customer service is great too and being able to get help from the discord server is very quick and convenient.
I have been using Super Speedy Filters few years now and would recommend it to anyone running a large WooCommerce store. The filters are rapid compared to default WordPress ones and support is second to none. 10/10
Super Speedy Search Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →- Analytics & Caching: Track Searches and Cache Hot Results
- Faster wp-admin meta search
- Multi-search: Prioritise Recent Content for Faster Searches
- Searching multiple post types in full-page search results: Single ranked list vs Mixed sections
- Smart Variation Search
- Taxonomy combination suggestions
- Taxonomy Search
- 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
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?
5.55.1 (7th July 2026)
- Fixed a fatal error that could take down wp-admin on sites still running an older build. The main plugin file used to load helper files out of the plugin's test folder, including one required on every REST API init. When the test folder was moved to a hidden .tests directory during a refactor, that path no longer resolved and PHP threw an uncaught "Failed opening required '…/tests/test-frontend-search.php'" fatal during admin REST preloads (seen via WooCommerce/Jetpack). The main plugin file now loads no test code at all – the .tests harness bootstraps itself – so this whole class of error cannot recur.
5.55 (15th June 2026)
- Added meta key axis option to taxonomy suggestions so you can mix and match meta values and term names in the suggestions builder
- Updated the Super Speedy Settings page: added a "Recheck Licenses" button above the licence table so customers have a clear way to refresh licence status after a renewal or upgrade without scrolling down to the licence-key field. The button is disabled until a licence key is entered/saved and re-enables as you type.
- The Recheck flow now also force-bypasses the auth-server's own 1-hour licence cache (via a `force=1` flag on the `wpiapi/check_product_key` call), so renewals/upgrades that completed less than an hour before a recheck no longer show as expired/exceeded. Normal admin page loads continue to use both caches as before — only an explicit Recheck click bypasses them. (Lives in the `super-speedy-settings` submodule, so the change propagates to every Super Speedy plugin.)
5.54 (11th June 2026)
- Fixed error with mysqli error (`mysqli_get_server_info(): Argument #1 ($mysql) must be of type mysqli, null given`) that could appear in the PHP error log during the WordPress `shutdown` hook, typically attributed to WooCommerce Action Scheduler. The suggestions/autocomplete handler `sss_get_json_Suggestions()` was calling `$wpdb->close()`, which closed the shared global database connection mid-request. WordPress does not reconnect within the same request, so the next code to use the database on shutdown — usually WooCommerce's BatchProcessingController calling Action Scheduler — crashed on the now-null connection handle. The redundant `$wpdb->close()` call has been removed; PHP closes the connection automatically at the end of the request anyway.
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
Get Super Speedy Search →