When WordPress search isn’t enough
WordPress’s built-in search is a simple database query. For a blog with a few hundred posts, that is fine. For a shop with thousands of products, or a publisher with years of archives, it gets slow and returns odd results.
In Milano I ran a workshop on replacing it with Elasticsearch, three years after talking about Apache Solr in Frankfurt.
Why Elasticsearch
It is built for search: relevance ranking, typo tolerance, filters and facets, and it stays fast as content grows. And it isn’t only for the search box. You can send heavy WP_Query calls to Elasticsearch too, which takes load off your database.
Running it
You can host your own instance or use a managed service. Self-hosting gives control but needs someone to look after it. For most businesses, managed is the sensible choice.
Connecting WordPress
Plugins handle the indexing and the query integration, so your theme keeps using normal WordPress functions while Elasticsearch does the work underneath.
The question to ask before any of this is the same one I ask today: what are users trying to find, and how fast do they need it? Search is UX. Better search means people find what they came for.
