WordPress’s native search often falls short when it comes to in-depth site searches that involve custom fields, products, attachments, and other content.
For websites with content beyond posts and pages, this can be a real hassle as site visitors will not be able to find much content, resulting in a poor user experience.
A search plugin like Relevanssi remedies the shortcomings of WordPress’s native search functionality by adding features that take WordPress search from basic to powerful.
This hands-on review article takes a close look at the Relevanssi search plugin, exploring its key features and use cases to help users understand the plugin and decide whether it’s the right fit for their needs.
📑 Table of Contents
What is Relevanssi?
Relevanssi is a WordPress search plugin that replaces the default WordPress search with a more feature-rich search engine. Its core purpose is to deliver search results that are sorted by relevance rather than by chronological order.
The Relevanssi plugin gives users full control over how search works on their WordPress websites. It indexes content into a custom database table and uses a content-matching mechanism to return relevant results for each search query.
Relevanssi is available in both free and premium versions. The free version includes all basic features, while the premium version offers more advanced features.
Content-heavy websites, such as e-commerce stores, membership sites, and multi-language sites, would find the best use for a plugin like Relevanssi.
Relevanssi Core Features
Relevanssi offers several great features that supercharge the search experience for users. Those features are examined in detail in this section.
Advanced Indexing Beyond Default WordPress Search
One of the biggest downsides of WordPress’s native search is that it indexes only the titles and content of post types and pages. As a result, every other piece of content on a website becomes much harder to find.
Like most highly-rated WordPress search plugins, the Relevanssi plugin addresses this issue by indexing a broader range of content types, including:
- Custom fields - metadata such as pricing, SKU, and ACF fields
- Taxonomy terms - post categories, tags, and custom taxonomies
- Shortcode output - content generated by shortcodes
- PDFs - text extracted from uploaded PDFs
- User profiles - names and profiles of users on a WordPress website account
This means that site visitors will always be able to search a wider range of content and find the most relevant results quickly.
Relevance-Based Ranking Engine
The Relevanssi search engine prioritizes the weight (or relevance score) of various content elements to rank content most relevant to a user's search.
The weighing system lets users assign numerical multipliers to different content areas. For any content element to weigh more in search results, it must be assigned a higher number. To decrease the significance of an element, a number lower than 1 must be assigned.
For example, an e-commerce store might assign 10 to “product titles” and 8 to “product SKUs” to ensure that exact product matches are displayed when a site visitor searches for either.
With Relevanssi Premium, users can take search settings a step further with AND/OR logic, letting them decide whether results should be displayed when all terms match or when any terms match.
Additionally, the plugin supports fuzzy matching and partial matching to make the search experience more accommodating for site visitors and reduce the “no results” frustration.
Fuzzy matching ensures that results can be found for a search query even if it contains typos, while partial matching searches word “stems” and returns any matching results.
Search Behavior Features
Relevanssi offers several features that further refine search results so that site visitors always find what they need. These include:
- Phrase Matching: This lets users enclose phrases in quotes for exact matches. For example, a search for “Legal Services” on a law firm site returns content with that exact phrase.
- Synonyms: Users can link related or commonly misspelled terms to improve search results. For example, “sofa=couch”, “lorry=truck”, “SEO=Search Engine Optimization”, etc.
- Stopwords: Allows users to exclude irrelevant words from being indexed, reducing the size of a site’s database and making searches run faster. Some stopwords are already excluded by default with the plugin. Examples include “a”, “all”, “with”, “the”, etc.
- Highlighting Search Terms: Relevanssi highlights any keyword matches that appear in the search results or on content pages. Users can customize the highlight color using CSS to match their branding.
Search Logging and Analytics
Relevanssi offers a search logging feature that records key details for every search query, helping users analyze searches on their websites.
The log captures the search query, timestamp, number of results displayed, and the user (if logged in).
With the logging feature, users can easily identify searches that returned no matches and adjust their synonyms to ensure those terms match the appropriate content, if it already exists on their site.
Another useful application is identifying content gaps on a user’s website. For example, if many visitors to a WordPress tutorial site are searching for “make WordPress load faster,” but there’s no matching content for that phrase, users can create it.
Multilingual & Multisite Support
Relevanssi supports the WPML multi-language plugin as well as Polylang, and can search and display only content relevant to the currently active language. This way, a French visitor to a website, for example, sees only French content, while an English visitor sees only English.
Multisite indexing is also supported in the plugin's premium version. This lets users with multiple WordPress sites in a network search across all sites.
A good example of this feature's use case is a university with multiple departmental sites. When a site visitor runs a search, the most relevant result from the appropriate departmental site will be displayed.
Performance & Index Management
To keep a user’s site performance at its peak, the Relevanssi plugin developer has provided transparent information on the database space required to use the plugin without performance issues.
Users are advised to multiply the size of their wp_posts database table by 3 to estimate the space needed to prevent performance-related issues.
Another valuable feature for performance management is an exclusion setting that lets users exclude specific content, such as posts, categories, or post types, from being indexed and appearing in search results.
For developers, Relevanssi supports command-line index management. This makes it easy to rebuild the index via the terminal, set up cron jobs to automate maintenance, and manage multiple sites more efficiently.
Setting Up and Configuring Relevanssi
It’s now time to explore the Relevanssi plugin and how to set it up to deliver the most relevant search results to site visitors.
Installing Relevanssi and Running the First Index
Since Relevanssi is a freemium plugin, it can be installed in two ways.
For the free version, users can navigate to their WordPress admin dashboard and then click Plugins › Add Plugin. Search “Relevanssi” and click Install Now › Activate.
To install the premium version, download the .zip file after purchasing the license. Then go to Plugins › Add Plugin › Upload Plugin › Install Now › Activate.
Key Settings To Configure First
After activating the plugin, users can view all Relevanssi’s configuration options by clicking Settings on the Plugins dashboard page.
The page that appears is the Overview page, where users can enter their API key and follow the instructions in the Getting Started section to set things up.
The first thing to configure is the Indexing Tab. This is where users build their search index by clicking Build the Index.
Before the search index is built, the indexing options below should be configured. Relevanssi lets users choose which post types, taxonomies, comments, custom fields, excerpts, and more to include or exclude from search.
There’s also an Advanced Indexing Settings section that lets users set the minimum word length to index, control how punctuation is indexed, and choose whether post type archives should be indexed.
Once all preferred settings have been configured, users can click the Save the Options button at the bottom of the screen, then click Build the Index. The index building process will complete quickly as long as it does not get stuck along the way.
Customizing Relevance and Weighting
The Searching Tab is where users customize the relevance and weighting of search results.
The first option is to choose the search logic operator, either AND or OR. AND requires all terms to match and is a stricter form of matching, while OR requires any term to match and gives broader results.
Keyword matching is also configured in this tab. Users can choose whole-word matches, partial-word matches, or partial words if there are no hits for whole words.
Next is the Weights section, one of Relevanssi's most powerful search customization features. Here, various elements can be assigned numerical values that determine their importance in search results. The higher the number, the stronger the ranking signal for the search algorithm.
Other settings on this tab provide deeper customization. Users can keep the default settings as is or change them if needed for their specific use case.
Once all settings are configured, click Save the Options, and Relevanssi will begin fine-tuning your search results. Users can explore the other features discussed in earlier sections of this article for even deeper customization of search results.
Common Configuration Mistakes to Avoid
When using the Relevanssi plugin, users should be aware of common mistakes that degrade the quality of search results shown to site visitors. These include:
- Forgetting to rebuild the index after installing the plugin or changing indexing options.
- Indexing too many post types by default.
- Rebuilding the index too often.
- Not assigning appropriate relevance weights to content elements.
- Leaving logging enabled on content-heavy sites.
- Ignoring zero-result searches in logs.
Generally, users get much better results with Relevanssi by properly scoping which content elements to index and assigning each element an appropriate weight.
Relevanssi Pros & Cons
Pros
- Improved search relevance compared to native WordPress search
- More comprehensive indexing
- Customizable search engine algorithm
- Feature-rich free version
- Built-in search logging and analytics
- Compatible with WooCommerce and custom fields
- Support for multisite search
Cons
- Outdated and utilitarian user interface
- Requires lots of database space
- Can degrade performance on large sites
- Settings can feel overwhelming for non-technical users
- Index maintenance must be done manually
- Does not support complex Boolean logic
- Documentation can feel too technical for beginners
Relevanssi Pricing
Relevanssi offers a free version of its plugin available in the WordPress.org plugin repository. The free version includes core search features such as custom field indexing, weight adjustment, synonym customization, and comment search.
It’s a solid option for small- to medium-sized e-commerce sites, blogs, portfolios, and more.
The premium version of the plugin is available in two plans: Annual and Permanent. Both plans include the full set of premium features Relevanssi offers, including PDF indexing, multisite search, spelling suggestions, export and import settings, and priority support, among others.
The main difference between the two plans is that the Annual plan must be renewed each year to continue receiving plugin updates and support, while the Permanent plan eliminates recurring payments and provides lifetime updates and support.
The Annual plan costs $128.78, while the Permanent plan costs $431.44.
Final Thoughts - Is Relevanssi Worth It?
Relevanssi addresses many of the limitations of WordPress’s native search feature. It offers better control over search results and better results for site visitors. This provides a more pleasant overall experience for both parties.
The free version of the Relevanssi plugin does a lot on its own. It offers all the core features needed to significantly improve search output from the jump. It's also straightforward to set up at a basic level, and the results on the frontend are immediate.
The premium version takes things a step further with more advanced features ideal for specific use cases, such as sites that require indexing PDF documents, WooCommerce stores that need SKU search, and multisite networks.
While Relevanssi has some clear drawbacks, such as limitations when indexing large sites with over 30,000 posts and the need for significant database space, it’s still a great search plugin option for most content-rich WordPress sites where users depend on search.
The key to getting the most out of Relevanssi is having some technical know-how and understanding how to configure it optimally to return the most relevant results.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Relevanssi plugin offers both a free and a premium version. The free version includes core features such as comprehensive indexing, keyword matching, and relevance-based ranking, which help immediately improve search results on a WordPress website.
Relevanssi’s premium features include indexing PDF content, enabling multisite searches, supporting custom fields such as WooCommerce SKUs and ACF field content, and supporting shortcode output, taxonomy terms, and user profile searches.
SearchWP is a premium-only search plugin that offers an intuitive, beginner-friendly interface and better overall compatibility with WordPress and popular plugins. Relevanssi offers a powerful free version with core search features, but requires more initial configuration.
Relevanssi — Related Information
