Overview – Improving WordPress Search With Relevanssi
Let’s face it, the out of the box search that comes with WordPress is not that great.
Something I like to use on client’s sites is a plugin called Relevanssi, this extends WordPress search and improves the results your site visitors get when they do a search.
It has a series of settings which allows us to fine tune your site’s search features and make the search results faster, more targeted. We can use the tool to track searches to improve our site and give a much better searching experience to our site visitors.
By extending search with Relevanssi you can do the following
- Improve speed of search results by indexing your content.
- Target what content you allow people to search on.
- Allow searching on custom fields.
- Control the logic of searches, use AND or OR searches
- Allow partial word searching
- Log searches to see what your customers are looking for make changes to your UX/UI
- Use weighting of content to highlight different content types
- Extensions – Rest API, live search type ahead.
It’s a freemium plugin, the free version is more than enough for most sites, the premium version which costs approx. $129 here’s a list of the features you get when you go pro.
Video
Here’s a walk through of Relevanssi free version.
Wrap Up – Improving WordPress Search With Relevanssi
If you find that the native WordPress search features are not working for you I would recommend you check out this plugin.
The ability to tune your search and direct your site visitors to exactly the content they need is a really useful tools. If people can’t find what they need when they need it they are going to click away.
If you need help improving the search on your WordPress site I can definitely help, get in touch.
Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash