WooCommerce Layered Nav vs Super Speedy Filters
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Filters on your store.
Get Super Speedy Filters →Comparing WooCommerce Layered Nav with Super Speedy Filters? 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 Layered Nav
WooCommerce Layered Nav is the built-in attribute filtering widget that ships with WooCommerce. It adds sidebar filters based on product attributes and allows visitors to narrow down products by options like colour, size, or material. It is available at no extra cost and requires no additional plugin to install.
How Super Speedy Filters differs from WooCommerce Layered Nav
All plugins from Super Speedy Plugins share a SQL-first architecture and an uncompromising focus on performance — and Super Speedy Filters is no different. Here is what sets it apart:
The SQL-first WooCommerce product filters plugin. Category, brand, attribute and custom taxonomy filters that stay fast whether you have 5,000 products or a million, with the best archive SEO control of any filter plugin we have tested.
- Instant AJAX filtering so shoppers keep browsing instead of bouncing
- Smart Variations – filter to ‘red’ and see the in-stock red variant, then click straight through to it
- Long-tail SEO URLs like /product-category/dogs/brand/dogsrus/colour/white/ to pull in Google traffic
- Colour, image and swatch filters, dropdowns, popouts, ranges and more
- Works with every builder – Elementor, Oxygen, Beaver Builder, Themify and the rest
Rated 5 out of 5 across 13 reviews, and backed by a 60-day money-back guarantee.
WooCommerce Layered Nav uses standard WordPress queries that run through the full WP_Query stack — functional for small catalogues but increasingly slow as product count grows. Super Speedy Filters bypasses that stack entirely with dedicated SQL tables, allowing filter queries to return in milliseconds even on catalogues with hundreds of thousands of products. It also adds AJAX updates, range sliders, price filters, and SEO-friendly URLs that the native widget does not offer.
How to choose between WooCommerce Layered Nav and Super Speedy Filters?
The built-in WooCommerce layered navigation is a reasonable starting point, but it does not scale. As your catalogue grows, filter queries get slower and the feature set stays static. Super Speedy Filters is built from the ground up for performance, with dedicated SQL tables and a SQL-first architecture tested against one-million-product catalogues. A free trial is available to see the difference on your own store.
What do others say about Super Speedy Filters?
Hi Dave, the plugin is great, very fast and highly customisable. Would be great if it was compatible with Yith Brands Add-on. We have many brand pages and would like to use filters on brand pages as well, such as filter by categories and attributes, which is very important for a e-commerce site. REGARDS
It's nice to look at the website after turning on this plugin, instant filtration of products even on pages with a huge amount of them. The plugin gives conditional display of filters, e.g. if we want a filter to be visible in a given place only, i.e. after selecting a category or taxonomy field, it will appear only when we select any category, which products are assigned to this category and there is at least one assigned to this product attribute . In addition, you can change the SLUG quickly, i.e. the link does not have to be the same as the filter name, we can choose another. It's worth using. I spent a lot of time finding this plug and testing others in the market. I am currently stating that it is the # 1 plugin for filtering products on WooCommerce among the others. The top ones are often limited to e.g. 100,000 products, but filtering is also slower than this FWW plugin.
We were looking for a filter plug-in that was compatible with our shops with 30-70 thousand products. Until then, no other filter was able to process such quantities satisfactorily and fulfil our wishes. Due to our good experiences with wpintense (Scalability Pro), we took Dave at his word and installed the plugin. Particularly noteworthy are Dave's tireless improvements and first-class support. Almost all wishes are answered immediately and a solution is sought and found. The filter plugin is also therefore able to filter extensive shops extremely quickly and reliably. We are thrilled with the performance of the filter and the wpintense team! Of course we will now buy the "lifetime" licence.
Super Speedy Filters Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →- Adjusting imports to work with Super Speedy Filters
- How to upload and activate the Super Speedy Filters plugin
- PHP SEO Filters for Super Speedy Filters
- Removing the slow WooCommerce code
- Adding description to category
- Confirming Brand landing page works
- Making sure categories appear in the shop archive
- Ordering by price with products that have no price
- Page-2 loading Page-1 products when there aren't enough products
- Radio Display Type buttons filling in
- Show/Hide search box
- Variable product – Color
Articles about Super Speedy Filters
View all articles →- Bug fix sprint
- Adding a custom taxonomy widget to Faster Woo Widgets
- December Development Update
- More beta updates available
- Faster Woo Widgets beta
- Dev Diary #7
- Dev Diary #6
- Dev Diary #4
- Dev diary #3
- Dev Diary #2
What's new in Super Speedy Filters?
6.36.1 (7th July 2026)
- Fixed the "Show but delay execution" filter still not loading on search results on some sites (typically HTTPS/staging). The lazy-load request used an absolute REST URL from `rest_url()`, which could come back as `http://` or a different host and be blocked by the browser before any request was sent, so nothing showed in the network tab. It now uses a root-relative URL that always matches the page's own scheme and host.
6.36 (4th July 2026)
- Improved delayed filters ("Show but delay execution") staying empty on search results pages. Two causes: the lazy-load request used a hard-coded /wp-json/ address that failed on sites using plain permalinks or forcing trailing slashes (the browser cached the redirect, so the request silently never completed), and the endpoint that builds the filter was re-deferring it instead of rendering its options. Filters now load correctly regardless of your permalink settings. If a filter was previously stuck empty, clear your page/object cache after updating.
6.35 (3rd July 2026)
- Fixed the per-filter "Show but delay execution" option on search results pages. Previously the deferred filter only ever populated when it was inside a popout/popover container; with "No container" (and minimizable/accordion) the filter box showed but its options never loaded. Now every container type works: filters in a container load when the shopper opens/hovers/expands them, and filters with no container load automatically just after the page finishes rendering. Updated the option's help tooltip to explain this and recommend (but not require) a container.
- Fixed filter counts falling back to the slower query path on stores that use Super Speedy Listings (formerly Super Speedy Archives) to build the object_ancestors table. SSF now recognises the Listings-built table for its fast filter-count path instead of only its own copy, via a shared readiness check (ssf_object_ancestors_ready()).
- Fixed `wp ssf rebuild` leaving the object-ancestors "table ready" status stuck showing "processing" on sites with a persistent object cache (Redis/Memcached). The rebuild now clears the cached status flags so the table is correctly reported as ready — previously this could mislead the admin notices and the automatic rebuild trigger until the cache expired.
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Filters on your store.
Get Super Speedy Filters →