Version 3.2.0 Release

Faster, Smarter, More Accessible.

The biggest update since our v3 release in 2024 – this release touches every part of the plugin: a completely redesigned admin interface, dramatically faster performance on both the frontend and backend, a powerful new search engine, comprehensive accessibility improvements, and dozens of quality-of-life enhancements.

Whether you’re using the free or Pro version of Search & Filter, there’s something major here for everyone. Buckle up because there’s a lot to cover!

A Fresh New Admin Experience

We learnt a whole lot over the last year about what worked and what didn’t with the new admin dashboard.

Taking into consideration your suggestions and feedback, and leaning into the new design systems for FSE (Full Site Editing) and the upcoming WordPress admin redesign, we’ve come up with a new design that we hope will feel right at home within the modern WordPress dashboard, while not straying too far from what worked well already.

What’s New

Grid & List Views – Switch between visual grid layouts and detailed list views for the Fields and Styles pages, allowing you to scan and preview your work visually.
Full Screen Editing – Things were getting a little crowded with the number of options and features offered with Search & Filter, so our editing screens now utilize all available space.
Responsive Design – The Admin UI now adapts beautifully to any screen size, from mobile to ultrawide monitors
Faster Navigation – A new sidebar layout with breadcrumb navigation and streamlined header design will allow you to move between pages faster than ever before.
Better Performance – Admin screens load faster with optimized data handling.

Before & After: Fields List

Before & After: Field Editor

10x Performance Gains

Probably the largest part of this release – we’ve focused heavily on performance optimizations and techniques, benchmarking everything at scale so you can search and filter faster, with larger sites than ever before.

Faster Indexer Queries

We’ve rewritten our underlying Indexer architecture to be 10x faster (and more in some circumstances), both on the frontend and the backend when building the index.

Specialized Index Tables – New bitmap and bucket-based tables designed specifically for different data types (choice fields, range fields, search) make indexer queries much faster.
10x Faster Frontend Queries – Complex, high-volume filtered queries that used to take seconds now complete in milliseconds.
Faster Indexing – Combined with our per data type indexing approach, batch processing means rebuilding your index is 10x faster or more. You can now index around 10,000 posts in a couple of minutes.
Large Query Optimizer – Works around hosting & MySQL limitations that cause slowdowns with large result sets – currently available via Beta Features.
Caching Optimizations – Use drop-ins or caching plugins to enable Memcached or Redis support for your server and watch your site fly through the most complex challenges, with graceful fallback to database caching as needed. We also now support enabling APCu caching for even more gains.

With increased speed comes increased performance and less overheads for your hosting server – this means you can work with larger amounts of posts and filter combinations than you ever could before.

As rough guide, if you were seeing performance bottlenecks with around 20,000 posts, you’ll likely be able to scale up to 50,000 or more.

Keep an eye out for our upcoming performance article where we’ll deep dive into how all this works (with benchmarks!).

Smarter Asset Loading (Free + Pro)

Aside from indexer upgrades, the frontend is now significantly lighter using our new Smart Asset Loading Feature:

Smart Asset Loading – Only loads the CSS and JavaScript components your page needs – and doesn’t load anything on pages that don’t use Search & Filter. Enable via the new admin option (enabled by default for all new installs).
+50% Fewer Database Queries – Reduced the number of queries on the frontend by more than half.
Faster Page Loads – Less frontend code & database queries = faster page loading for your visitors and more sales.

Putting the “Search” back into Search & Filter

We are super excited about this one. The new Enhanced Search feature (available for Pro users via the Beta Features setting) brings lightning-fast full-text search to your site.

Search Indexes – As part of our indexer rework, we created purpose-built indexes for blazing-fast searches to support sites with high traffic and large amounts of data.
Search Multiple Data Sources – Add and combine as many data types as needed, mix and match between taxonomies, SKUs, custom fields and more.
BM25 Search Scoring – Industry-standard relevance ranking for search results.
Stemming & Phonetic Search – Find “running” when searching “run”, or handle typos gracefully – works with 14 languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and more.
Exact Match Search – Let customers search by product SKU or any other data type to find exactly what they’re looking for.
ACF & Custom Field Support – Index and search content from Advanced Custom Fields, combine multiple fields into one search field.

While extensively tested, this is currently a Beta Feature. We’d love for you to help us with testing this out – enable it today via the new Beta Features setting in your Search & Filter Dashboard.

Styles System Overhaul

Creating beautiful, on-brand faceted search interfaces is now easier than ever as we complete Phase 2 (of 3) for our Styles system overhaul.

Design Tokens System – CSS variables that cascade intelligently across your fields.
New Style Controls
- Shadows and presets
- Border styling (color, radius, width, style)
- Input padding and gaps
- Dropdown customization (attachment mode, gap, indent depth)
- Placeholder colors
- Label and description borders

We know adding more options doesn’t always translate to making things easier. We have some big plans for our final Phase 3 of the Styles system, coming later this year.

Accessibility First

We’ve made significant accessibility improvements throughout the plugin:

Skip Links – Keyboard users can jump directly to results after filtering on page reload.
Screen Reader Announcements – Results counts and “no results” states are announced after searches complete.
Form Field Structure – Checkboxes, radios and button groups now use fieldset + legend for better screen reader support.
ARIA Improvements – Fixed combobox patterns, roles, active descendant handling and screen reader announcements.
Translatable Labels – All accessibility labels can be customized via the Field or Query editor settings.
Popover Attachment – Popovers now append inline with the option to use the old behaviour of attaching them before the closing </body> tag for situations that required enhanced theme compatibility. Inline popovers are enabled by default for new installs.
Color Contrast Ratios – Updated default colors and design tokens to meet WCAG contrast ratios.

These improvements benefit all users and help meet WCAG compliance requirements.

While we’ve come a long way, there is still more to do to achieve AA standard across the entire surface of the plugin.

WooCommerce Improvements

Available in Search & Filter Pro

Major enhancements for WooCommerce stores:

SKU Search – Customers can search by product SKU (requires Enhanced Search).
Custom Attributes – New data type for WooCommerce custom attributes.
Weight & Dimensions – Filter products by weight, length, width, or height in choice or range fields.
Better Variation Handling – Improved indexing and filtering for variable products.
ACF Integration – Index ACF fields attached to products and variations.
Product Taxonomy Archives – Better support for filtering on product category, tag, and brand archives.

Quality of Life Improvements

Import & Export Everything

New comprehensive import/export system:

Import/Export queries, fields, styles, and settings – individually or in bulk.
Perfect for migrations – Move configurations between staging and production.
Site cloning – Quickly replicate setups across multiple sites.

New and Improved Field Capabilities

Results Per Page Field – Let visitors choose how many results to show.
Tri-State Checkbox Toggle – Option to use classic checkbox selection instead of tri-state.
Disable Dropdown Search – Turn off text search in select dropdowns.
Term Ordering – Control how taxonomy terms are ordered in fields.
Custom URL Prefixes (Pro) – It’s no longer required to use underscores before field names.
Location Tracking – See at a glance all the posts and pages where your fields are used.

Query Enhancements

Random Ordering with Seed (Free) – Randomize results while maintaining pagination.
Offset Parameter (Free) – Skip a number of posts from the beginning.
Include/Exclude Posts (Free) – Explicitly include or exclude specific posts from results.
Dynamic Field Updates (Pro) – Fields update their options on interaction, before form submission

Block Editor Enhancements

Unified Block System – All field blocks reorganized and easier to find in the block inserter. Every field block is re-usable and can be edited from the block editor or our admin dashboard.
Load Field Block – New utility block to dynamically load and re-use fields, replacing the re-usable field block.
Query Loop Preview – See the connected Search & Filter query directly in the Query Loop block preview and edit the connected query using the modal Query Editor.
Field Status Indicators – Disabled and trashed fields display an outline/icon in the editor for better visibility.
Block Transformations – Convert between field types with automatic attribute handling.
Legacy Block Migration – Old blocks automatically upgraded to the new system.

Developer Improvements

Updated Hook Names – More consistent naming with deprecation warnings for old hooks.
New Filters – Additional hooks for customizing field output and behavior.
Table Management – New automated database schema management system.

Upgrade Notes

Automatic Migration – The new indexer will automatically migrate your data. This happens in the background and may take a few minutes for large sites – frontend will be unaffected during this process.
Beta Features – The Enhanced Search and Large Query Optimizer are available under Settings → Beta Features. They are marked as beta which means they should be tested on staging and development sites.
Style Regeneration – Styles will be automatically regenerated on upgrade to use the new design tokens system after you confirm the upgrade via our admin notice. We recommend testing on a staging site first.
- CSS class has been renamed from .search-filter-component-popup to .search-filter-component-popover
Block Editor Upgrades – blocks will be automatically migrated to our new block system – you’ll find all your existing blocks are now available via our dashboard too (and have auto-generated names).
Script & Style handles have changed. Frontend now uses search-filter-frontend (instead of search-filter) and admin now uses search-filter-admin.
If you are using Elementor or Beaver Builder, you should update our extension plugins to the latest versions at the same time as upgrading to 3.2.0.

Bug Fixes

There have been over 50 bug fixes to our plugins in this release, bringing much better stability across the board.

Get the full breakdown via our changelogs:

What’s Next?

This release has put the finishing touches on some essential foundational work for us to complete our v2 to v3 migration tool – coming in version 3.3.0.

Thanks to all who helped us test this release!

There are plenty of other goodies lined up for 2026, we can’t wait to share them with you. Keep an eye out for announcements in the future!