Help visitors find relevant results

Relevanssi Premium replaces standard WordPress search and can order results by relevance instead of date. Partial-word matching can find results when a complete word is unavailable, and visitors can search for exact phrases in quotation marks. They can pick OR searches to match any term or AND searches to require every term; the plus and minus operators support AND and NOT searches.

Custom excerpts can display where a match occurred and highlight search terms. Those terms can also be highlighted in a document after a visitor opens it from the results. Premium improves spelling correction for “Did you mean?” suggestions.

Extend the search index

Search can cover comments, tags, categories, custom fields, custom post types, custom taxonomies and shortcode contents. Premium includes indexing for PDF, Office and Open Office attachment content, visitor profiles, and category, tag and custom taxonomy pages. It can also index arbitrary columns in the wp_posts MySQL table and search across websites in the same multisite installation.

Shape ranking and search controls

Adjust the weighting of titles, tags and comments, or assign weights to post types and taxonomies and give new posts extra weight. Searches can be restricted to categories or tags, and advanced filtering can shape the results. Query logging shows popular searches and recent searches with no hits; “Did you mean?” suggestions can draw on successful user searches.

For large databases, search result throttling can help performance. A filter hook can disable indexing of post content and titles. Premium also includes settings export and import, WP CLI commands for supported search management tasks, related-post functionality and redirects for searches.

Check the website’s content and compatibility needs

Attachment indexing can make document contents searchable, while multisite search can bring content from several sites in one installation into a single search experience. Profile and taxonomy indexing can help visitors find structured information. Relevanssi supports bbPress, Gutenberg, WPML, Polylang and membership extensions including s2member, Members, Groups and Simple Membership.

Configure the index and allow database space

Install and activate the extension in WordPress, then open its settings and build the index following the instructions there. Contextual help is available from the Help menu on the settings page in the WordPress admin dashboard.

Plan for database storage before using the extension. A rough estimate is three times the size of the wp_posts table, and limited space for database tables may cause problems.