WooCommerce Layered Nav vs Super Speedy Filters
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Filters on your store.
Get Super Speedy Filters →The measured result changes with catalogue size and cache state. WooCommerce core recorded the lowest averages in our 10,000-item test. At 100,000 simple products without Redis, Super Speedy Filters averaged 257.100 ms on the first pass and 208.672 ms of PHP render time, compared with WooCommerce core at 740.000 ms and 670.097 ms. With Redis warm, WooCommerce core recorded the lowest second-pass TTFB. Read the complete 100,000-product benchmark.
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:
Every filter click should feel immediate, even when the catalogue is large. Super Speedy Filters cuts expensive taxonomy work, updates products and filters together, and keeps crawler-heavy filter combinations away from WordPress.
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 →- Colour swatches
- Filters in the block editor
- Inline Product Filters
- SEO Overrides
- Stopping bots crawling your filters
- Using SEO Overrides in Super Speedy Filters
- Adjusting imports to work with Super Speedy Filters
- Auto Configure
- Controlling filters with an AI assistant
- How to upload and activate the Super Speedy Filters plugin
- PHP SEO Filters for Super Speedy Filters
- Removing the slow WooCommerce code
- Setting up a store with an AI assistant
- 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?
6.44.0 (6th August 2026)
- Fixed filtered pages on a Polylang or TranslatePress site in any language other than the default building their SEO title, breadcrumbs and SEO override match from an incomplete filter set, so a French page titled *Buy in Red Online* now reads *Buy Chairs in Red Online*
- Fixed an Exact SEO override written for a translated URL losing to a Contains override on Polylang and TranslatePress sites
- Filtered pages you allow to be indexed now carry correct `hreflang` tags on Polylang sites, listing the equivalent filtered URL in each language with a self-reference and `x-default`, the same as WPML
- Fixed every brand facet on a non-default-language archive being a dead link on Polylang sites, e.g. `/fr/product-category/chaises/fr/brand/ikea-fr/`
- Polylang Pro's translated slugs are now understood, so a French page at `/fr/categorie-produit/chaises/` builds its title, breadcrumbs and filter links from the right terms
- SSF's SEO wording now appears in Polylang under Languages then Translations, in the *Super Speedy Filters* group, including the title prefix and suffix, the connectors, the meta description wording, the browser title suffix, the paginated title text and the on sale prefix
- Every text field on a filter widget can now be translated per language in WPML String Translation or Polylang Translations: the search box placeholder, the clear filters and clear search labels, the group heading, the dropdown text, the required filters tooltip and the stock, on sale and postmeta toggle labels. One widget with translated strings, not one widget per language
- The *Show products on sale* and *Show in stock* wording on the Show Existing Filters widget is translatable too, defaults included
- Swatch colours and term thumbnails fall back to the default language's term, so a palette set once in English shows on every language
- All of SSF's text now uses one `super-speedy-filters` text domain, so a single `.mo` file or Loco Translate covers the plugin
- TranslatePress keeps its own hreflang tags on filtered pages, which are already correct
- Removed the `SSF_POLYLANG` constant and its wp-config setting, replaced by the language handling above, which needs no switch
- Tested up to WordPress 7.0
- The plugin header declares GPLv3 and WordPress 7.0, matching `readme.txt`
- Auto Configure now picks layout and placement on one step before Review, defaulting to a filter bar placed above your products; the one-button layout places itself the same way, and only the sidebar layout asks which sidebar or shortcode area to use
- The layout sets each filter's container, a filter bar makes every filter a popout button, a sidebar removes the containers, and the review previews show exactly what will be created
- Auto Configure defaults changed: hierarchical taxonomies get a list with large images one click away, taxonomies with term images get large image tiles, and taxonomies with colours get colour labels
- Auto Configure shows product counts only on the main hierarchy filter, every other filter it creates hides them
- Brand taxonomies are treated as flat even though WooCommerce registers them hierarchical, so brands with logos get the large image tiles
- On the review step, changing a setting keeps your scroll position, popout containers in the previews open on click, and the step circles at the top navigate back
- The scan summary now reads in groups, posts then taxonomies then terms, and counts the terms carrying colours and images rather than the taxonomies
- Auto Configure's admin script and stylesheet reload automatically after an update, no hard refresh needed
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Filters on your store.
Get Super Speedy Filters →
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