Site Search 360 Review: An Excellent Alternative to WordPress Search

 

Displaying an accessible search box on the website enables visitors to find what they want with ease. However, that’s not only what this box is restricted to do. If you’re using an adequate WordPress search plugin, you’d be able to know what exactly your visitors are looking! Here is a review of an alternative for WordPress Search – Site Search 360.

If you’re running an online store, this practice can help you discover such products that aren’t listed on your site yet but are well in demand. Accordingly, research done by eConsultancy revealed that up to 30% of online store visitors use the search box to look for products.

However, what’s worse is that another report by eConsultancy reveals that only 7% of website owners are learning from the data gathered from the search box and using it in other parts of the business.

In case you’re running an informative blog, having a search box can help you ascertain topics that your audience wants to read. With the help of queries searched on the site, you can reshape your blog and make it more relevant.
Apart from just adding a search box at the top of the page, even if you’re adding one towards the end of the article, it’s likely that at least 1% of the visitors use it.

Common Problems with In-Built WordPress Search:

Having a WordPress website, sure you get entitled to a lot of beneficial features. And, the inbuilt search box is one of them. However, despite the preference, there are some limitations to this feature, such as:

Inadequacy of The Core Search Feature:

When visitors use the search box to look out for something on your site, be it a product or some information, all they expect is perfection. And, the inbuilt search feature of WordPress might not be an ace in this matter.

No Relevant Result:

Talking about the relevancy, the core feature of this popular CMS lacks in this aspect. Considering how your visitors would prefer no-nonsense result from the search, it’d be recommended to integrate such a WordPress search plugin that provides nothing but accuracy. Site Search 360 allows you to add weight to the search results. It will solve the problem of relevancy as now you can control which result you want to show on top.

File search:

Accordingly, several users complained that they didn’t find files they were searching for, using the inbuilt search feature. Site Search allows showing files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) in search results.

Site Search 360 – An Impressive WordPress Search Plugin:

When looking for an excellent plugin, this one could be your choice. Site Search 360 is a speedy search solution that enables your visitors to execute relevant searches instantly.

This plugin comes with an extensive range of features that can enhance the usability of your website even more.

Features of Site Search 360:

Let’s have a look at some powerful features of Site Search 360.

Lightning Quick Search:

When it comes to the service response time, this plugin takes anywhere between 10 and 100ms per request. It automatically redirects your visitors to the closest server for quickest results and suggestions.

Availability of Voice Search:

Your visitors can even enjoy a smooth and prompt voice-activated search experience. Although it’s currently available for Chrome users, however, quite soon it’ll roll out across other browsers.

Customization Options:

As far as the customization options are concerned, Site Search 360 provides innumerable of them. Thus, you can always alter it as per your needs and requirements.

Mobile-Ready:

To make things easier for you, the Site Search 360 plugin comes with adequate mobile compatibility. If your visitors are using a screen smaller than 600px, the mobile mode will get automatically activated, helping visitors avail the best experience.

Helpful Analytics:

With Site Search 360, you can seamlessly enhance user retention and gather the insights to increase your conversion and revenue. You can keep track of what your visitors are looking for, at what timing, and what’s the search result they’re clicking the most.

Autocomplete and search suggestions:

In default WordPress search, you need to install a plugin to add the autocomplete feature in search. Whereas, Site search 360 shows auto suggestions as typed in the search bar. You can see suggested results after typing three letters.

Use Site Search 360 as a search engine:

You can use default WordPress search and let Site Search 360 fetch search results. It also allows showing search result from multiple domains. If you have various sites, you can link your search results with this powerful tool.

Full Custom mode:

You can customize the complete look and feel of the search bar. It also allows you to import settings from search designer. You need to insert the code on your site, and that’s it! You have a robust search engine running on your website.

Pros	Cons
User-friendly functionality	Can be expensive
Easy & fast implementation	Little less famous than competitors
The flexibility of search results	Less intuitive developers
Quicker output

Alternative for Google Search:

Site Search 360 is considered one of the best alternatives for Google search. To understand more about it, here’s a brief comparison that will help you comprehend it correctly:

Features	Site Search 360	Google Custom Search
Extensive Design Customization	YES	YES
In-depth Analytics	YES	YES
Complete Synonym Control	YES	NO
Complete Relevance Fine-Tuning	YES	NO
Third-Party Branding-Free	YES	NO

Plugin Customization:

As far as customization is concerned, you can edit almost every visual aspect of the search interface in three easy steps. All you’d have to do is configure, preview, and deploy your changes.
This plugin allows you to configure the following factors:

• Theme & Background Color
• Loading Animation
• Icon & Button
• Text Size & Color
• Embedding & Layover

And, much more!

Pricing of Site Search 360:

If you’re worried about the pricing, don’t fret out. This well-used plugin is available in both free and premium versions. While the former one can be downloaded from the WordPress repository, the latter one comes with three different packages. They have a price tag of $9, $39, $99/month.

Customer Reviews:

Here is what customers have to say, this plugin has got some of the mixed reviews as follow:

“In September, we replaced Google Site Search with SiteSearch 360. We are thrilled with the outcome.” – Maryanne O. (Source)

“Easy to implement site search, but it needs tweaking its algorithms.” – Vytenis P. (Source)

“I give four stars instead of five because there were some problems in the beginning with the searches. But, I must say that I’m very much impressed with the service. Every issue that I came up with was resolved either immediately or within a few days.” – Johan Jong (Source)

User Experience:

We visited a site implementing site search 360. The search results were very detailed. Here is what we noticed:

• You can see how search can be designed with Search Designer feature.
• It gives control of what data should be displayed. For example, you can choose to display page meta descriptions or text around the search query in your search snippets.
• It provides detailed analytics about whether users are finding search results useful. If the score is low, you can improve the results for that query.
• It also supports audio search in the latest browser.
• Prompt support, they quickly launched a plugin update after being informed about the installation issue.

Plugin Installation:

If you’re ready to install and configure this plugin, the process is going to be quite simple. Follow these steps, and you’ll be done before you realize:

• Visit WordPress plugins option on the dashboard
• Click Add New
• Search for Site Search 360
• Click Install Now & Activate

Once done, on the left side menu bar, you’ll find the plugin option. Upon clicking over it, they’ll ask you to create an account. You can fill out the form and then click the Register button.
And then, you’ll be redirected to the configuration screen where you can alter and edit the settings as per your requirements.

Wrapping Up:

At the end of the review, now that you’re familiar with its features as well as pros and cons, making a decision would be easier, isn’t it? So, ultimately, SiteSearch 360 is one of the best plugins that you can use to alternate the inbuilt search box. Discover more of it, if you want to, and then use it seamlessly on your site.