Managing various WordPress websites over the years has taught me just how essential a fast, reliable search function is.

Most modern WordPress sites now feature content beyond simple posts and pages. Many of the sites I manage use Advanced Custom Fields, custom post types, and metadata-rich content, which together provide a richer experience for visitors. However, when they search for data using the default WordPress search, it’s often crickets, and they bounce.

The best way to improve WordPress search is by using a plugin. While looking for the top WordPress search plugins, I discovered Relevanssi, a popular option in the WordPress search space.

I tested it and wrote this detailed review covering its core features, performance, ease of use, pros, cons, and more. My goal is to help you decide whether or not the Relevanssi plugin is worth installing on your WordPress site. So let’s get started.

What is Relevanssi?

Relevanssi is a freemium search plugin that improves WordPress’s default search with a more advanced, relevance-based algorithm. 

The plugin builds its own index within your WordPress database, ranks the content, and then displays search results based on how closely they match a visitor’s query.

With Relevanssi, you get a free version that is not just a teaser but is genuinely powerful enough to make a real difference in your site’s search on its own. The premium version includes additional features such as multisite searching and indexing of PDFs and custom fields.

Relevanssi also supports WooCommerce search; however, you may need to make a few manual adjustments to ensure it works correctly on your site, depending on your specific requirements. 

Another point to note is that Relevanssi requires a significant amount of database space. The plugin developer states that you need approximately three times the size of your wp_posts database table. 

For a small site with roughly 5000 posts, that amounts to about 30-50MB extra, which isn’t too bad. But for larger sites, resource needs can add up quickly, so proper planning is required to prevent issues.

Key Features & Performance

Relevance Weighting System

The weighting system is Relevanssi’s key differentiator from other popular WordPress search plugins. I assigned numerical values to individual content elements such as Content, Titles, and Internal Links. This allowed me to control how they ranked in search results.

I experimented with my WooCommerce product catalog by setting the weight of the “product post type” to 5. This instantly improved the accuracy of product search results. 

Even though Relevanssi does not include a setting to adjust the weight of product SKUs on the “Searching” tab (this must be done with code), I noticed that my product SKU searches still returned accurate results.

Relevanssi also includes AND/OR search logic, and I tested both to see how they affected search results. 

The AND logic is stricter and requires all search terms to match, while the OR logic matches content that includes any of the search terms, leading to broader search results. I found that the default setting, OR logic combined with partial keyword matching, worked best. It handles real-world user search behavior really well.

Content Indexing Capabilities

Relevanssi is excellent at indexing most of the content that WordPress’s default search misses.

From the “Indexing” tab, I was able to select all the content I wanted the plugin to include in my search index and exclude others. I added custom fields, such as SKUs and taxonomy terms, along with multiple post types, including pages, posts, and products.

After making my selections, I rebuilt the index, and the difference in search result relevance was immediately noticeable. Content that previously returned no results now surfaced correctly.

Relevanssi also supports indexing shortcodes, user profiles, comments, synonyms, and even PDF files (for pro users), but I didn’t test those extensively in my staging environment.

Indexing my posts and WooCommerce catalogs took just a few seconds, which was faster than I expected. The impact on my site’s database and performance was minimal, given the small scale of the staging site.

Larger sites will need closer monitoring, but for my setup, the impact on the database and performance was a non-issue.

WooCommerce Integration

During my research into the Relevanssi WordPress search plugin, I came across a disclaimer from the developer: “To get the most out of Relevanssi and WooCommerce, you need to make adjustments: everything doesn’t work perfectly straight out of the box.”

This led me to assume that its WooCommerce integration might require major tweaks to produce meaningful search results. To my pleasant surprise, that was not the case.

After configuring the plugin to index the SKU custom field and setting the “product post type” weight to a high value, the product search results became quite accurate. Searching for products by their SKUs and attributes returned correct results that the default WordPress search had missed.

Relevanssi provides code snippets in its documentation for more advanced WooCommerce search configurations, such as adding a weight boost for in-stock products or filtering products by price.

Search Behavior Features

Relevanssi offers several search behavior features that enhance the quality of search results shown to visitors.

I tested features present in both the free and premium versions on my staging site. The “Synonym” tab contains settings for mapping related search terms together. It ensures that when a visitor searches for an alternative term for parts of your content, like sofa instead of couch, they still see relevant results.

The Stopwords tab allows you to exclude common words from the index to reduce database bloat and speed up searches. By default, Relevanssi skips some of the most common words.

Phrase-matching worked as expected, returning exact matches when I searched for a term within quotation marks. Relevanssi also highlights search terms in results to help with quickly finding relevant content.

With the premium version, I also tested the “Did You Mean” suggestions and related search queries features, both of which help guide users when their searches contain typos or are vague. 

Search Analytics

The “Logging” tab contains all settings for Relevanssi’s built-in search logging feature.

This feature tracks every visitor query on your site and displays the data in a dashboard that shows total searches, successful searches, unsuccessful searches, and the number of clicks.

These data insights are very useful when you want to understand how well the search function is working and if you need to make adjustments.

For example, data on “unsuccessful searches” can help you identify if you need to add synonyms for certain terms or create new content to address those searches.

I should mention that the log dashboard is more practical than visual, so don’t expect a polished interface. It’s a simple table view, but the data it provides is still very helpful in improving the overall search experience on your site.

Ease of Use

Installing the Relevanssi search plugin followed the usual WordPress plugin installation steps. Since I tested with the premium version of the plugin, I used the manual plugin upload method. 

If you want to use the free version, all you need to do is search “Relevanssi” in the Plugins repository within your admin dashboard, and you can install and activate it within seconds.

Once activated, you can open up the Settings, which presents many options right away. This can feel a bit overwhelming, especially since the interface is quite dated compared to more modern drag-and-drop interfaces.

To get the plugin to replace the default WordPress search, the first step is to build the index. This took only a few seconds during my test because I had only a few posts and a small product catalog.

After the indexing process finished, I proceeded with configuring all other important settings that control how the search function works. It required some trial and error, but I eventually got everything set up to my satisfaction.

Relevanssi also offers documentation on how to set up the plugin. However, it leans toward technical details and might not be suitable for beginner WordPress users.

Overall, I’d say Relevanssi is best for users who don’t mind working through the settings methodically rather than those who want a plug-and-play setup right out of the box.

Relevanssi Pricing Tiers

Relevanssi offers a free plugin version, along with pro plans that enhance its capabilities.

Below is an overview of the available paid plans:

Plan Name	Site Licenses	Price
Annual	Unlimited sites	$129.64
Permanent	Unlimited sites	$434.30

The free plugin provides core search improvements, including relevance weighting, custom post-type indexing, and search logging. The pro version adds PDF indexing, “Did You Mean” suggestions, multisite search, related searches, and priority support.

I recommend starting with the free version to see if the plugin meets your site’s search needs before upgrading to the premium version.

Relevanssi Pros & Cons

Pros

• It offers a genuinely useful free version.
• I found the relevance-based search powerful and appreciated the high level of algorithm customization it provides.
• It includes support for WooCommerce, which works well even with minimal initial adjustments.
• I like that it indexes a lot of key content, such as custom fields and taxonomies, which WordPress’s default search overlooks.
• The premium version provides multisite search support, which is extremely valuable for large site networks where visitors need to filter through extensive content to find what they are looking for.
• The built-in search analytics are useful for continuously improving the search function and maintaining a top-notch user experience.

Cons

• It is heavily database-dependent, especially for large sites.
• Performance may significantly decline on sites with 30k or more posts.
• The plugin can feel somewhat too complicated for beginners or non-technical users.
• The index must be rebuilt manually whenever changes are made.
• Its user interface appears quite dated.

What Real Users Say About Relevanssi

Relevanssi has a strong 4.8/5-star rating on the WordPress.org plugin repository, based on over 300 reviews. Many users commend the significant improvement it provides to the default WordPress search, with one user noting, “The difference is Night and Day!”

There’s also a lot of positive feedback about the developer, Mikko Saari’s responsive support, as well as the extensive search customization options the plugin offers.

Most criticisms of Relevanssi tend to focus on the complexity of the initial setup and the database space it requires. I can allude to the upfront time investment needed for setup based on my experience during testing, but I believe the plugin’s powerful features outweigh the slight inconvenience.

Final Verdict: Is Relevanssi Right for You?

After testing the Relevanssi WordPress search plugin, I can confidently recommend it for sites that require precise control over search relevance. The free version alone offers many valuable features that significantly enhance search results.

You should choose Relevanssi if you are a more technical user comfortable with manual index management, or if you have ample database space and want powerful search without extra costs.

If you require even more advanced search features, such as PDF indexing or multisite search, the premium version is a good investment.

For my staging site’s scale, Relevanssi definitely delivered on its promise of relevant, customizable search results. However, if you have more than 30,000 posts, need minimal database impact, or prefer a simple drag-and-drop interface, you might want to explore other WordPress search plugin options.

Common Questions About Relevanssi

Further Reading

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• Affiliate for WooCommerce Plugin: Is It Worth It?
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