Discover, trust, install: FAIR 1.0 is here
Relevanssi – A Better Search
Version: 4.25.0
Description
Relevanssi replaces the standard WordPress search with a better search engine, with lots of features and configurable options. You’ll get better results, better presentation of results – your users will thank you.
This is the free version of Relevanssi. There’s also Relevanssi Premium, which has added features. For more information about Premium, see Relevanssi.com.
Do note that using Relevanssi may require large amounts (hundreds of megabytes) of database space (for a reasonable estimate, multiply the size of your wp_posts database table by three). If your hosting setup has a limited amount of space for database tables, using Relevanssi may cause problems. In those cases use of Relevanssi cannot be recommended.
Key features
- Search results sorted in the order of relevance, not by date.
- Fuzzy matching: match partial words, if complete words don’t match.
- Find documents matching either just one search term (OR query) or require all words to appear (AND query).
- Search for phrases with quotes, for example “search phrase”.
- Create custom excerpts that show where the hit was made, with the search terms highlighted.
- Highlight search terms in the documents when user clicks through search results.
- Search comments, tags, categories and custom fields.
- Multisite friendly.
- bbPress support.
- Gutenberg friendly.
Advanced features
- Adjust the weighting for titles, tags and comments.
- Log queries, show most popular queries and recent queries with no hits.
- Restrict searches to categories and tags using a hidden variable or plugin settings.
- Index custom post types and custom taxonomies.
- Index the contents of shortcodes.
- Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions based on successful user searches.
- Support for WPML multi-language plugin and Polylang.
- Support for s2member membership plugin, Members, Groups, Simple Membership and other membership plugins.
- Advanced filtering to help hacking the search results the way you want.
- Search result throttling to improve performance on large databases.
- Disable indexing of post content and post titles with a simple filter hook.
Premium features (only in Relevanssi Premium)
- Indexing attachment content (PDF, Office, Open Office).
- Improved spelling correction in “Did you mean?” suggestions.
- Searching across multiple sites in the same multisite installation.
- Search and index user profiles.
- Search and index taxonomy term pages (categories, tags, custom taxonomies).
- Search and index arbitrary columns in wp_posts MySQL table.
- Assign weights to any post types and taxonomies.
- Assign extra weight to new posts.
- Let the user choose between AND and OR searches, use + and – operator (AND and NOT).
- Export and import settings.
- WP CLI commands.
- Related posts.
- Redirects for searches.
Thanks
- Cristian Damm for tag indexing, comment indexing, post/page exclusion and general helpfulness.
- Marcus Dalgren for UTF-8 fixing.
- Warren Tape for 2.5.5 fixes.
- Mohib Ebrahim for relentless bug hunting.
- John Calahan for extensive 4.0 beta testing.
Installation
- Install the plugin from the WordPress plugin screen.
- Activate the plugin.
- Go to the plugin settings page and build the index following the instructions there.
- That’s it!
Relevanssi uses the standard search form and doesn’t usually need any changes in the search results template.
If the search does not bring any results, your theme probably has a query_posts() call in the search results template. That throws Relevanssi off. For more information, see The most important Relevanssi debugging trick.
Uninstalling
To uninstall the plugin remove the plugin using the normal WordPress plugin management tools (from the Plugins page, first Deactivate, then Delete). If you remove the plugin files manually, the database tables and options will remain.
Screenshots
Overview page
Indexing settings
Searching settings
Logging settings
Excerpts and highlights
Synonym settings
Stopword settings
Faq
You can find solutions and answers at the Relevanssi Knowledge Base.
Answers to many common problems can be found from the contextual menu. Just click “Help” in the top right corner of your WordPress admin dashboard on the Relevanssi settings page.
If you the results don’t change after installing and activating Relevanssi, the most likely reason is that you have a call to query_posts() on your search results template. This confuses Relevanssi. Try removing the query_posts() call and see what happens.
Please read Words with punctuation can’t be found. This is a Relevanssi feature, but you can fix it from Relevanssi indexing settings.
See the top of the admin menu. There’s ‘User searches’.
Relevanssi stores the relevance score it uses to sort results in the $post variable. Just add something like
echo $post->relevance_score
to your search results template inside a PHP code block to display the relevance score.
Relevanssi offers Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions. See “Did you mean” suggestions in the Knowledge Base for more details.
It’s the basic weighing scheme used in information retrieval. Tf stands for term frequency while idf is inverted document frequency. Term frequency is simply the number of times the term appears in a document, while document frequency is the number of documents in the database where the term appears.
Thus, the weight of the word for a document increases the more often it appears in the document and the less often it appears in other documents.
Each document database is full of useless words. All the little words that appear in just about every document are completely useless for information retrieval purposes. Basically, their inverted document frequency is really low, so they never have much power in matching. Also, removing those words helps to make the index smaller and searching faster.
Reviews
Great Product - Superior Support
By 
The product did 99% of what I wanted/needed. The developer took the time and patience to provide the missing 1%.
one of few must have plugins
By 
I'm not a plugin fan, but relevanssi is a must have as it's fantastic plugin (that wont kill your server) with great support
Exactly what I needed!
By 
This plugin is exactly what I needed. I'm so happy I found it. Having only the titles, excerpts. and a small amount of content from my recipe pages used in the built-in WordPress search was really limiting. My taxonomies contained all kinds of information people would search for (ingredients, meal/course, dietary restrictions, tags) and with Relevanssi, this is all now searchable. And I see I can also add synonyms, which will be great for certain ingredients that are called different things depending on location (people will be able to search courgette and find my recipes with zucchini).
In addition to this, I initially encountered an issue (completely of my own making) and the creator of the plugin was very responsive and quite easily managed to identify the problem once I provided enough detail of the issue. In less than 24 hours, my problem was solved. Thank you Mikko!
Highly recommend this plugin.
Great plugin and great support
By 
An excellent plugin and some great support to handle some specific site needs.
Great plugin. Does exactly what it promisses.
By 
This powerful plugin has revolutionised the complex search on my client's site which contains tens of thousands of images with keywords.
I had an issue with speed and the plugin author himself stepped in to point me in the right direction to fix it (which was not a problem with the plugin itself).
Top marks for a great product from a great developer.
Great plugin. Great support!
By 
Thank you so much Mikko for a great plugin and your excellent support.
Really good solution for our archive
By 
We bought Premium yesterday and by the end of today we were able to do a proof of concept for a news archive we are putting together. In one day of development I was able to put together a page of pdf's with mixed Lithuanian and English text. I was able to restrict the search on the page to a few categories and exclude unrelated pages on the site.
Your documentation on the modifications required to the functions.php file was really good and I was able to make the changes even though I don't know php.
We will be moving to multisite in future and I am confident we will be able to port this to the new site without difficulty. Thanks, Mikko!
An essential plugin when you have a lot of meta data
By 
Thanks so much, Mikko.
I use your plugin with a lot of meta data—over 1,600,000 across 40,000 entries—and it works like a charm.
Cheers!
Excellent Search Plugin
By 
I was really impressed by the quick support from the plugin team; Relevanssi Search has greatly improved the search functionality on my WordPress site. It provides more accurate and relevant results than the default search, with features like custom post type indexing and partial matching.
Thanks to the developer(s)
Great functionallity
By 
Less is more. Great intuitive interface and working perfect wiht Tagdiv Newspaper.
Changelog
4.25.0
- New feature: New filter hook
relevanssi_index_excerptcan be used to control which excerpts are indexed and which are not. - Minor fix: The
tribe_eventsshortcode is now blocked in indexing, as it caused problems. - Minor fix: Foolproofing the meta_query sorting to avoid errors from non-array values.