Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between ElasticPress and ElasticPress.io?

ElasticPress is our free WordPress plugin found on the WordPress.org plugin repository. It links your WordPress site to an Elasticsearch server, allowing for optimized content indexing and querying.

ElasticPress.io, on the other hand, is our managed hosting service centered around Elasticsearch, specifically designed for WordPress. It offers additional features like custom APIs for autosuggest and Instant Results.

To improve your WordPress site’s search functionality using Elasticsearch, you’ll need both the ElasticPress plugin and an Elasticsearch-hosted instance such as the one from ElasticPress.io.

Is it possible to search for shortcode and block rendered content? And custom fields?

By default, WordPress does not search for the outputted version of shortcodes and some blocks, but ElasticPress indexes both forms of content. If you want to make rendered shortcodes and blocks searchable for your users, you just need to follow the instructions in this article.

Indexing and searching for custom field values is also an ElasticPress feature not present in WordPress out-of-the-box installations. Including custom fields in our search algorithm is as simple as visiting the Fields & Weighting Dashboard and including your fields there.

I like ElasticPress’ typeahead solution, but I’d like to display my product thumbnails there too. Is that possible?

Autosuggest, our typeahead search functionality, is fully customizable. You can include any indexed field information to it, and also change its overall style or, for example, add a “View All” link. Check out our article on how to enhance and customize Autosuggest.

My WordPress installation is super slow. How can I make my website search experience faster?

Using our Instant Results feature, you can provide the fastest search experience for your users: bypassing WordPress entirely, your users will fetch data from our API directly, making the whole search almost instantaneous. Thanks to our exclusive security API layer, your content is secure, as a result, no one will be able to see protected content.

To see Instant Results in action, visit our Demo Website.

Does ElasticPress support cross-site search in multisite installations?

Yes, you can display search results from different sites in the same multisite installation. Check out this article for more information.

Does ElasticPress support searching content from external websites?

Although that is possible, it requires some custom code. The external website will need to have its content indexed in our indices in the same format WordPress content is, and then the search will have to be customized to fetch those content entries.

If you need help developing that or any other custom solution, our experts are here to help!

Why is ElasticPress displaying search results that do not contain the term searched?

Fuzziness is one of the ways ElasticPress enhances your search results: if a user searches for a misspelled term, our search engine will try to get results with similar terms. Also, through different language stemmers, ElasticPress will search for root words, matching words like friendship to their root form, friend.

As with everything else in the plugin, that behavior can be customized. Check out this article on how to disable fuzziness.

Still have questions? Check the FAQ section in our documentation!