New to the community? Start here

What are the best search for Large (Enterprise) WordPress Website?

Google and many top websites raise users’ expectations when they try to search for something on a website. I humbly wish to seek opinions from everyone on which search service/plugin/addon/integration they utilize for large websites (>300K unique visitors/month).

I have found Algolia and Elasticsearch, but I am wondering which one is better, AND if there are any other suggestions.

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 1:31:51
  • benprice
    • Site Builder, Child of Zeus

    I found this article very useful but, necessarily incomplete. My recollection is that the native WordPress search function only indexes the posts and pages titles. If true, this search knowledge domain is too restricted for most visitors. My recollection about these powerful search plugins is their index database is larger than the site content. For lean hosting services like WPMUDev these large index databases are impractical. How are these search index databases optimized? Can they be hosted in AWS like videos a and backup files?

    • Adam
      • Support Gorilla

      Hi benprice

      This is a very good point actually.

      With an “average size” (even “slightly bigger”) and a powerful server, an “in site” search should be fine. By “in site” I mean solution – a plugin like Relevanssi or similar that provides “full content indexing” – should be fine, although it can affect performance. This often is an acceptable “bargain”.

      But with huge sites – with a lot content of different types and a lot of traffic – that impact on performance may be too big and in quite a significant part related to how DB works. As you pointed out, database for such use should be prepared and optimized in quite a specific way to provide the best efficiency and speed.

      However, this isn’t quite a matter of the host. It’s more of how the WP DB is structured and what it’s used for at its core. With a huge search it would indeed be better to keep search indexes in a separate, highly efficient and scalable DB of its own. But that requires special solutions.

      You mentioned WPMU DEV and that’s actually the case where we do use WordPress as a base but all this setup is so far from a standard install as it can be. We use a lot of customizations/custom solution – including those created in-house by us and for us only but also 3rd-party tools/solutions incorporated. I don’t know all the technical details to the “core” level but for what it’s worth, I can say that it’s literally years of on-going work by many people and not something that could be ported “out of the box” to be shared as a “install and use” type of solution publicly. Not really because we don’t want to but rather just because it’s all so deeply integrated with our sites and services that it’s nearly impossible technically.

      And yes, we do use different databases and various scalable solutions for data processing and delivery.

      Getting back to the search itself – it’s a valid point that it would be best to host such search indexes in a separate dedicated databases but this requires also a dedicated solution. This is where services such as e.g. Elasticsearch and similar come to play as a part of their solution is also a dedicated cloud for search indexes storage. So basically: you implement the search to be integrated with your site but the crawlers index the content and create/store indexes in external cloud provided by them (which is also where the complex search algorithms are executed and results are returned from). So it’s basically like “your own Google for your own site”.

      Best regards,
      Adam