Search Hero
Replaces the built in WordPress search with a real search engine: relevance ranked results, built for large sites, with no external service.
Will this break my store?
What the WordPress.org registry says about keeping Search Hero running.
Tested to 7.0.2
Tested against the WordPress branch in use today.19 days ago
At least 3.3 releases a year since launch. WordPress.org only lists versions still available for download, so the real number may be higher.7.2
Your host must be running at least this version.4.9
1
A single maintainer. Worth knowing if the plugin is load-bearing for your store.Maintenance & trust
Scored on how Search Hero is looked after — not on how many stores run it.
Maintenance
35 / 35WordPress compatibility
20 / 20Support responsiveness
Not enough dataMerchant satisfaction
Not enough dataListing transparency
3 / 10Ratings
No one has rated this plugin on WordPress.org yet. That is a statement about the ratings page, not about the plugin — plenty of well-kept plugins never collect them.
WordPress searches your posts with a database LIKE query. It gets slower as your site grows, it cannot tell an important match from a passing mention, and it orders results by date rather than by how well they match.
Search Hero replaces that with a proper search index of your content, so results come back ranked by how relevant they actually are.
How results are ranked
- Every word you search for has to appear in a post for it to match. The one exception is a word so common it turns up in almost every post on your site, like “the”, which tells us nothing about which post you want and is ignored.
- Rare words count for more than common ones, so a post about your search term beats one that merely mentions it.
- Words found close together score higher, so a search for several words favours posts where they appear as a phrase.
- Matches in a short post count for more than the same matches buried in a long one.
As you type
Results appear under your search box as visitors type. Each search box covers one kind of content: a normal search box searches your posts, and a product search box searches products. There is a [search_hero_search post_type="product"] shortcode for a search box on any page, and the same instant results appear on the admin post list, where they take you straight to the editor.
What gets indexed
Every public post type that is searchable: posts, pages, custom post types, and products. Each one is indexed into its own tables, so Products can be rebuilt without touching Posts, and a rebuild of one leaves the rest searchable throughout. Choose which ones on the settings page; developers can narrow or widen the choices with the search_hero_indexed_post_types filter.
It stays up to date on its own
Index once after installing. From then on, publishing, editing, unpublishing, trashing, restoring and deleting content all update the index as they happen. There is nothing to re-run.
No external service
The index lives in your own database. Nothing about your content is sent anywhere, there is no API key, and there is no per search cost.
No. New and edited content is indexed as you save it. Indexing by hand is only for the first run, or if you want to rebuild from scratch.
Yes. Any public post type that is searchable can be indexed, each into its own tables, and you choose which ones on the settings page. Each search covers a single kind: a product search returns products, a post search returns posts. WordPress already tells the plugin which one from the search itself, so a WooCommerce product search reaches the product index automatically.
No, by design. A search covers one post type. Content of different kinds is indexed separately and never mixed into one list, because how well something matches is only meaningful next to others of the same kind. Point a search box at the type you want with the shortcode’s post_type attribute, or let the query decide.
Yes, for this release. Relevance scoring and the stored index both changed, so run Rebuild Index (or wp search-hero index) once after updating.
Searching reads a compact index rather than scanning your posts table, so it gets faster relative to the built in search as your site grows. Indexing is the expensive part, and it only runs when content changes.
Categories
Plugin details
Tags on WordPress.org
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