Where it started: search, and a first talk
This was my first WordCamp talk, in Frankfurt in 2016, together with Ivaylo Kolbinger Ivanov. Ten years and twenty WordCamps later, it is nice to look back at where it began.
The topic was search. WordPress’s default search was, and in many ways still is, a basic database lookup. It doesn’t understand relevance, struggles with large sites and can’t do faceted filtering.
Why Solr
Apache Solr is a dedicated search engine. It gives you proper full-text search, relevance ranking, faceted search for shops and catalogues, and it stays fast under heavy traffic. We compared it feature by feature with default WordPress search, and the gap was big.
When it is worth it
Not every site needs it. A blog with a few hundred posts is fine as it is. A high-traffic site with thousands of posts or products, where search is how people find things, is where Solr pays off.
Self-hosted or as a service
We showed both: installing Solr on your own server with Java and configuration files, and using a hosted service, which is what we recommended for most people. The live demo connected WordPress to a hosted Solr in a few minutes.
Looking back, the theme was already there: people come to your site to find something. Help them find it fast.
