Unveiling Algolia’s WordPress search plugin – blog search at the speed of thought

Sep 27th 2016 product

Today we are very excited to announce our Search by Algolia plugin for WordPress which will bring relevancy, instant search and autocomplete capabilities to almost 30% of the internet which is powered by WordPress.

We believe that every website or blog, irrespective of size, deserves good search so that users can easily navigate and find relevant content.

With our new plugin, every WordPress user will be able to leverage Algolia in just a few clicks, and replace the default WordPress site search with a blazing fast, highly relevant search engine.

Today’s default WordPress search and most other search plugins out there are based on simple SQL queries, which aren’t high on the relevancy quotient, adds unnecessary load to your hosting environment, and slows down your site. They weren’t designed to handle complex user needs, such as typo tolerance, and they weren’t designed to scale with your content (in fact, they do just the opposite). We think the Search by Algolia plugin will solve these problems.

Easy Set-up and Automatic Updates

Since Algolia is a completely hosted service, you initially need to send the data. The plugin handles this automatically for you and lets you index the following content types by default:

Post-Types: Including Posts, Pages and custom registered post types,
Taxonomies: Including Categories, Tags and any custom registered taxonomy,
Users: All the contributors of the website.

Every time you update Posts, Taxonomy terms and Users, we automatically synchronize the data for you.

No matter how many blog posts, categories, tags, or users you have, the plugin’s built-in queue mechanism allows it to handle any amount of data.

Algolia makes it easy for you to customize ranking and configure indices in order to achieve optimal relevancy. When you use the Search by Algolia plugin for WordPress, we take care of everything for you, so you get the best search experience out of Algolia without any of the setup hassle.

Out-of-the-box Autocomplete and Drop-down menus

Most WordPress themes display a search bar on every page of the your website by default. By enabling autocomplete, we add instant results at each keystroke in every one of your search bars.

screenshot-2016-09-27-22-11-57 — ***Here is what it looks like on SaaStr***

Our plugin provides you with a beautiful default layout for your dropdown results, and the templates can be completely customized, of course.

Bringing instant search results page to your WordPress

Our plugin provides you with a fully featured instant-search results page. You simply have to enable the instant-search feature in the plugin and it will replace the default search page with a search page that includes filters and displays results as-you-type!

The newly provided search page will allow users to filter the content of your website based on content types, categories, tags or even authors.

Of course the default appearance and behavior can be fully customized with just a little knowledge of CSS and JavaScript. If you’re not comfortable customizing your WordPress UI, we’re confident you’ll be happy with the default design!

Our Plugin is designed with the WordPress developer community in mind

**Here is what it looks like on ForEntrepreneurs.com**

The whole plugin has been built with extensibility in mind and can be used as the foundation for every Algolia search experience on WordPress websites.

Here are a few highlights:

Easy to override templates (without requiring editing of the actual plugin files),
Over 30 WordPress action & filters to customize and extend functionality,
Built-in logging system to help understand everything that happens when building your own search experience,
Every feature can be enabled/disabled so that you can leverage the features that matter for your project,
Last but not least, the plugin is thoroughly documented here.

The plugin is open sourced on GitHub. We invite anyone to submit feature requests or bug reports by opening issues on the repository: https://github.com/algolia/algoliasearch-wordpress

We haven’t forgotten about you, WooCommerce users!

If you are a WooCommerce user, we’ve got you covered. We’re about to release an extension to this plugin, so stay tuned for the Search by Algolia for WooCommerce plugin by subscribing here (We will only send you 1 email to inform you of the release)

We wanted to mention beta testers and developers without whom this plugin wouldn’t be out yet!