Features

Explore Relevanssi and all the features

All features listed

WP Search vs. Free vs. Premium

Feature	WordPress search	Relevanssi Free	Relevanssi Premium
Basic Features
Easy to install	✓	✓	✓
The index is updated automatically	✓	✓	✓
Newest posts first	✓	✓	✓
Best results first	✓	✓	✓
Search posts and pages	✓	✓	✓
Advanced Search Features
Search comments and comment authors	–	✓	✓
Search post categories, tags and custom taxonomies	–	✓	✓
Search custom fields	–	✓	✓
Search shortcode content	–	✓	✓
Search post excerpts	–	✓	✓
Multisite & Indexing
Include user profiles in search results	–	–	✓
Index PDF content	–	–	✓
Indexing DOC, ODT, RTF, ePub… content	–	–	✓
Include taxonomy terms in search results	–	–	✓
Search arbitrary MySQL columns in wp_posts	–	–	✓
Suggestions & Highlighting
Show “Did you mean” suggestions	–	✓	✓
Search results show and highlight the matches	–	✓	✓
Posts highlight the search term matches	–	✓	✓
Operators & Weighting
Choose between AND and OR operator in search	–	✓	✓
Change the operator on the fly if necessary	–	–	✓
Use the NOT operator to exclude search terms	–	–	✓
Adjust the weight of post content, titles and comments	–	✓	✓
Adjust weights by post type	–	–	✓
Adjust weights by taxonomy	–	–	✓
Adjust weights by post date	–	–	✓
Adjust weights manually with a filter hook	–	✓	✓
Logging & Stop Words
Log user queries	–	✓	✓
Use stop words to make the search better	–	✓	✓
Expand queries with synonyms	–	✓	✓
WPML and Polylang integration	–	✓	✓
Multisite / Plugins / Other
WordPress Multisite support	–	–	✓
Throttling to make searches perform better on big databases	–	✓	✓
Export/import settings	–	–	✓
WP CLI support	–	–	✓
Guaranteed support	–	–	✓
Have sticky posts in searches based on the search term	–	–	✓
English stemming	–	–	✓
Redirect search results	–	–	✓
Related Posts	–	–	✓

Beyond the feature comparison: Key capabilities that turn good search into an outstanding user experience.

Discover what makes Relevanssi special.

Search Accuracy & Relevance

Unlike the default WordPress search, which simply looks for exact matches, Relevanssi uses advanced relevance scoring. It considers factors like keyword frequency, proximity, and content importance to deliver far more accurate and useful search results.

Relevanssi Free already brings a significant improvement in search quality compared to the standard WordPress search.

Relevanssi Premium takes this even further with fine-tuned weighting options, the ability to boost specific post types, custom fields, and taxonomies, giving you full control over result relevance.

PDF & Attachment Content Search

Relevanssi can go beyond normal page and post content. It is able to index and search inside attached files, making your entire document library searchable.

Relevanssi Free supports basic attachment search (file names and metadata).

Relevanssi Premium unlocks full-text search inside PDF files and other documents. The content of your PDFs becomes fully searchable – a powerful feature for documentation sites, knowledge bases, and businesses with lots of downloadable files.

Multisite Support (WordPress Network)

Relevanssi can be installed as a network plugin and is then available across all sites in your WordPress Multisite network. With Relevanssi Premium, you can search across multiple sites within the same network.

Please note the following limitations:

Not all search filtering options available in single-site mode are supported in multisite searches.
In very large networks, performance may be affected.
Relevanssi Premium can only search across sites that belong to the same Multisite network.

Important: Multisite search is not available in the free version of Relevanssi.

Search Statistics & Logging

Understanding what your visitors are searching for is key to improving your content and user experience.

Relevanssi Free provides basic search functionality without logging.

Relevanssi Premium includes comprehensive search logging and analytics. You can see popular searches, failed searches, and trends over time – giving you valuable insights to optimize your website content.

WooCommerce Integration

Relevanssi works excellently with WooCommerce. It can search SKUs, product descriptions, attributes, custom fields, and handle product variations according to your specific needs.

For detailed instructions and best practices, please refer to our
WooCommerce manual and the
WooCommerce-related articles in our Knowledge Base.

bbPress Compatibility

Relevanssi supports bbPress to a good extent. It can index bbPress custom post types (forums, topics, and replies).

Important setup note: bbPress post types are excluded from search by default. You need to uncheck the option “Respect exclude_from_search” in the Relevanssi settings.

For useful indexing tips, please read: bbPress: Indexing topics and replies.

While there were occasional compatibility issues with certain themes in the past, recent tests show significantly better compatibility. As always with third-party plugins, we recommend testing thoroughly on a staging site.

Limitations – What Relevanssi Cannot Do

Relevanssi is a powerful search plugin, but there are some features it does not support. Here are the most commonly requested functionalities that are currently not available:

Content outside wp_posts table: Relevanssi cannot search content stored outside the standard WordPress wp_posts database table (with the exception of user profiles and taxonomy term pages). Custom post types stored in wp_posts can be searched.
Complex Boolean logic: Relevanssi supports basic AND/OR/NOT operators for the entire query or individual terms, but does not support advanced faceted Boolean searches such as (cats OR tigers OR lions) AND (pumas OR cougars) NOT dogs.
Live Ajax Search: For instant live search results with Ajax, please use our companion plugin Relevanssi Live Ajax Search.

Known incompatible plugins:
A list of plugins known to have compatibility issues with Relevanssi is maintained in our Knowledge Base.