Extend what WordPress can search

Relevanssi Premium replaces standard WordPress search with configurable, relevance-based results. Search can include comments, tags, categories, custom fields, custom post types, custom taxonomies, and shortcode content. Premium adds indexing for PDF, Office, and Open Office attachments, user profiles, taxonomy term pages, and arbitrary columns in the wp_posts MySQL table. It can also search across multiple websites in the same multisite installation.

For example, attachment indexing can make document contents searchable, while multisite search can bring content from several sites into one search experience.

Choose how searches match

Results can be ordered by relevance instead of date. Partial-word matching can find a result when a complete word does not match, and visitors can search for exact phrases in quotation marks. Searches can use OR logic to match any term or AND logic to require every term. Premium lets visitors choose between those modes and use the plus and minus operators for AND and NOT.

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

Adjust results and review search activity

Set weights for titles, tags, and comments, or assign weights to post types and taxonomies. New posts can receive 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; spelling suggestions can draw on successful user searches.

Other tools include search result throttling for large databases, a filter hook to disable indexing of post content and titles, options export and import, WP CLI commands for supported search management tasks, related-post functionality, and redirects for searches.

Compatibility and setup

Relevanssi supports multisite, bbPress, Gutenberg, WPML, Polylang, s2member, Members, Groups, and Simple Membership.

Install the add-on in WordPress, activate it, then open its settings and build the index by following the included instructions. Contextual help is available from the Help menu on the settings page, and the Relevanssi Knowledge Base has answers to common questions.

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