Knowledge Base

Knowledge base contains information on how to use Relevanssi. There are lots of features that are documented in the knowledge base. Here’s an index to the knowledge base, with all the entries sorted under different topics.

Knowledge Base

Debugging

Debugging indexing problems

The easiest way to debug indexing problems is to use the WP CLI tools available in Relevanssi Premium. To see…

Debugging Relevanssi searching issues

…admin search. Before checking the filters, try the Relevanssi admin search (Dashboard > Admin search). Does that find the correct results? If it does, then the problem is likely with…

Debugging with Query Monitor

Query Monitor is by far the best thing for a WordPress developer. It’s billed as the “Developer Tools panel for…

Most important Relevanssi debugging trick

When you have problems with Relevanssi, these are the first steps to take: Make sure you have the latest version…

Pinning and exclusion doesn’t work for custom post types in Gutenberg

Sometimes when you try to access the pinning or the exclusion settings for a custom post type post in the…

Relevanssi indexes excluded posts

Sometimes it can happen the search results include posts from a post type that has been excluded from the index.…

Results are in strange order

If best results don’t come up first and changing weighting settings doesn’t seem to make any difference, there couple of…

The wrong content gets indexed for a post

Sometimes Relevanssi can get confused and indexes the post content under the wrong post ID. The main symptoms for this…

Features

Can Relevanssi access content outside WordPress?

Short answer: no. Relevanssi can only access WordPress content. For a longer answer, read on. Only within single WP installation…

Click tracking

Relevanssi Premium 2.16 introduced a new feature of click tracking. It allows you to see the effectiveness of the search,…

Direct access to the query engine

Relevanssi can’t be used in any situation, because it checks the presence of search with the is_search() function. This causes some…

Index custom field contents

Custom fields (also known as post meta or meta fields) are a major part of WordPress the default search won’t…

Indexing and searching PDFs in WordPress

Relevanssi Premium users have asked for PDF indexing since day one, and version 2.0 finally introduced this feature. Coming up…

Multi-part excerpts

Relevanssi Premium 2.11 introduces a new feature: multi-part excerpts. There’s a new setting on the Excerpts & Highlights settings tab,…

Multisite searches

Multisite search only works in Relevanssi Premium. Free Relevanssi can be installed in multisite environments, but it cannot search across…

Pinning posts

Sometimes you want to get a specific post as the first result for a certain search, but Relevanssi doesn’t return…

Proximity sorting

Relevanssi Premium 2.16 added proximity sorting to search results. That means you can sort the search results by geographic location. Instead of having the most relevant matches first, you can…

…pre_option to change the value on the fly. add_filter( ‘pre_option_relevanssi_throttle_limit’, function() { return 50; } ); // Adjust the weight for tags to 20 to make tag matches more important.…

Removing Relevanssi from the quick edit

Relevanssi Premium adds Relevanssi tools to post edit pages and in the quick edit box. If you want to disable…

Spam search blocking

Spam searches are a common feature on WordPress sites. Spam bots make lots of useless queries. They hope sites display…

Target specific part of the post

Relevanssi Premium 2.4.4 introduced a new feature where you can target specific parts of the post straight from the search…

Taxonomy archive search

This is a Premium feature and only applies when you index taxonomy terms. This does not apply in free Relevanssi.…

User profile search

Relevanssi Premium can search user profiles. So far the following data gets indexed from user profiles: first name, last name,…

Voice Search

Modern search is about accessibility and speed. Relevanssi now includes a Voice Search feature that allows your visitors to search…

Wildcard matching

Relevanssi Premium 2.10.2 introduces a new way to search: wildcard matching. Once the wildcard matching is enabled (it is disabled…

Filter hooks

Adding direct links to outside pages to search results

Hi, is there a way to add a link to another website when searching for certain keywords? We have a…

Adding extra boost for exact title matches

Every now and then, somebody wants to see exact title matches higher in the results. Usually, the best way to…

Adjusting search throttle

If Relevanssi Premium causes out-of-memory problems, make sure you have the “Throttle searches” option checked. However, if that doesn’t work…

Auto-redirecting with one search result

If you want to auto-direct the user directly to the result if there’s just one result for the search, that’s…

Automatic redirects to category archives

While Relevanssi Premium can return taxonomy terms as search results, sometimes sending the searcher directly to the category archive is…

Blocking pre and code tags

If your posts have lots of programming code examples in <pre> and <code> tags, those might look pretty bad in…

Boosting shorter posts with higher keyword density

By default, Relevanssi tends to prefer longer posts. The default TF × IDF weights Relevanssi uses simply count the term…

Controlling attachment types in index

Relevanssi lets you index attachments. But perhaps you only want to index a particular type of attachment? Relevanssi settings don’t…

Custom weighing with relevanssi_match and relevanssi_results

…one week and halve the weight of posts older than that. add_filter( ‘relevanssi_match’, ‘date_weights’ ); function date_weights( $match ) { $post_date = get_the_time( ‘U’, $match->doc ); if ( time() –…

Different fuzzy search setting on different searches

On one of our sites we have 2 search boxes, one where you can do a normal search and the…

Disable in-page highlights on a specific page

Sometimes there’s a need to disable the in-page highlighting on specific pages. Perhaps the feature works fine on most pages,…

Disabling Relevanssi

If you need to disable Relevanssi, for example for a particular template, all you need to do is to unhook…

Exact matches for short search terms

Is is possible to set Relevanssi in a way that it would return only perfect matches for queries up to…

Excluding old content from the search

…* Adds a date filter to the search query. * * @param WP_Query $query The query object. * * @return WP_Query The modified query object. */ function rlv_date_filter( $query )…

Forced phrase search with fallback

Relevanssi by default does not consider the search query a phrase, or value posts where the words in the search query appear together. Sometimes people do expect that, especially in…

How to include specific posts

Hello, I’m using WooCommerce and Relevanssi and they work great.My Site Search only searches Products, however I want to let…

Indexing only attributes from shortcodes

I need to add some custom shortcodes to the list of the “removed” ones (so they don’t show in plain…

Indexing product codes with and without spaces

A Relevanssi Premium customer had a problem with product codes. The codes are in the format “ABC 100”, a group…

Indexing term descriptions for posts

Sometimes it is helpful to have Relevanssi index the taxonomy term descriptions for posts. For example, the term description can…

Integrating Koko Analytics stats

…the weight calculations is straightforward. The best tool to use is the relevanssi_results filter hook. It lets us modify the weights of the posts. For each post, we calculate a…

Integrating Post Views Counter stats

…in the weight calculations is straightforward. The best tool to use is the relevanssi_results filter hook. It lets us modify the weights of the posts. For each post, we calculate…

Moving the admin search page

Jules Colle came up with a method of moving the Relevanssi admin search page from under the Dashboard heading to…

Partial matches to just one custom field

Is it possible to set (with filters and/or actions/functions) Relevanssi to use whole words keyword matching for post titles and…

Redirecting email searches to the login page

A client asked for a solution to redirect all searches for email addresses to the login page – perhaps someone is…

Relevanssi breaks autoembeds on result pages

You may notice that enabling Relevanssi custom excerpts breaks all autoembeds (things like Youtube video embeds) on search results pages.…

Restrict search by author from the search query

You can set Relevanssi to index the post author, which will then let you find posts by searching for the…

Restricting Did you mean suggestions to one post type

Sometimes it may be necessary to restrict the Did you mean suggestions Relevanssi serves to just one post type. There’s…

Restricting the indexing to particular user roles

From the Relevanssi settings, you can only choose whether subscribers are indexed or not. If you need finer control over…

Restricting the search for non-logged-in users

There was an interesting support question: I have website with logged-in users as well as non-logged-in users.The logged-in user should…

Support for ^ and $ anchoring operators

In regular expressions, ^ can be used to match the beginning of the line and $ to match the end…

Using AND and NOT for Boolean operators

Relevanssi Premium has support for in-query Boolean operators. Relevanssi uses + and – for the operators: cats -dogs and cats…

Using multiple custom taxonomies

Usually, WordPress supports one category, one tag and one taxonomy in the search, if you use the query variables to…

Using phrases in Related posts searches

I have a book review site where I’m using Relevanssi Premium and the Related posts to highlight related book reviews.…

Using Relevanssi in wp_link_query

If you want to use Relevanssi in the link queries (the search you get when adding links to posts in…

Using Relevanssi without a search term

Deprecated: Relevanssi has long supported searching without a search term. These instructions are not necessary. Version 1.7.3 introduces the possibility…

WooCommerce: Return only exact matches for SKU searches

This little filter function works on relevanssi_hits_filter. When a search query is made that matches an SKU (or any other…

WP Download Manager

WP Download Manager is a popular file management plugin for WordPress. It’s unfortunately incompatible with Relevanssi attachment content reading out…

Year filter from the search query

A good question was asked in the post Natural-language date queries: Is it possible to extend this so that I…

Indexing

10Web Photo Gallery

The Photo Gallery plugin from 10Web uses a shortcode to add photo galleries to posts and pages. By default, Relevanssi…

ACF: Filtering custom fields by type

On sites where ACF fields are used a lot, with Flexible Content and Repeater fields, it may be difficult to…

ACF: Indexing ACF fields for taxonomy terms

Advanced Custom Fields makes it possible to add custom fields to taxonomy terms. You can only do this with Relevanssi…

Add more content to the index for Relevanssi Light

The main customisation for Relevanssi Light is to add more content to the index. For custom fields, it’s easiest to…

Blocking pre and code tags

If your posts have lots of programming code examples in <pre> and <code> tags, those might look pretty bad in…

Controlling attachment types in index

Relevanssi lets you index attachments. But perhaps you only want to index a particular type of attachment? Relevanssi settings don’t…

Disabling Relevanssi Light for a specific post type

Here’s how you can disable Relevanssi Light for a particular post type. The example is shop_order from WooCommerce: you’ll need…

Excluding old content from the search

…* Adds a date filter to the search query. * * @param WP_Query $query The query object. * * @return WP_Query The modified query object. */ function rlv_date_filter( $query )…

Excluding protected posts

A site I’m working with has a handful of “protected” posts (password required to view). For various reasons, we don’t…

How to index parent categories

Suppose you have a parent category with no products in it but a child category does. If you search by…

Increasing weight for HTML tags

…’relevanssi_post_content’, ‘rlv_html_tag_boost’ ); function rlv_html_tag_boost( $content ) { $weightings = array( ‘h1’ => 5, ‘h2’ => 4, ‘h3’ => 2, ‘strong’ => 1, ); foreach ( $weightings as $tag =>…

Index custom field contents

Custom fields (also known as post meta or meta fields) are a major part of WordPress the default search won’t…

Index only short numbers

Relevanssi has a minimum word length setting that is set to three characters. Any one- or two-letter words are not…

Indexing and searching PDFs in WordPress

Relevanssi Premium users have asked for PDF indexing since day one, and version 2.0 finally introduced this feature. Coming up…

Indexing attachment file names

Relevanssi has been working nicely for the normal usecase. But how does one setup indexing of attachment files. When someone…

Indexing attachments from File blocks

The Relevanssi attachment indexing assumes the files are connected to the posts using the WordPress attachment mechanism. What if you…

Indexing custom post statuses

If you’re using custom post statuses, Relevanssi requires some tinkering. By default, Relevanssi only handles posts that are of status…

Indexing embedded PDFs for the parent post

Relevanssi can automatically index PDF content for the parent post if the PDF (or other attachment) is attached to the…

Indexing fails? Check max_allowed_packet!

Sometimes Relevanssi can get stuck in the indexing. Relevanssi goes past the number of posts in the database and keeps…

Indexing HTML comments

By default, Relevanssi does not index HTML comments inside your posts. Relevanssi removes all HTML tags before indexing, and HTML…

Indexing image alt texts

Relevanssi by default ignores image alt texts (and other tag attributes). That’s often the right thing to do because alt…

Indexing image captions for the posts

The use case is I run several newspapers, and the “caption” field when uploading media is where the journalists put…

Indexing only attributes from shortcodes

I need to add some custom shortcodes to the list of the “removed” ones (so they don’t show in plain…

Indexing post slugs

By default, Relevanssi does not index the post slug. It is, however, an easy thing to fix using the relevanssi_content_to_index…

Indexing private custom fields for admins only

I use private custom fields. I want to index them in the administration but not on the public site. How…

Indexing product codes with and without spaces

A Relevanssi Premium customer had a problem with product codes. The codes are in the format “ABC 100”, a group…

Indexing term descriptions for posts

Sometimes it is helpful to have Relevanssi index the taxonomy term descriptions for posts. For example, the term description can…

Indexing term slugs

I have a term who name is for, example, Great Blue Trojans. The slug is GBT.I want to be able…

Indexing the post ID

Are post ID’s searchable in Relevanssi? No. Relevanssi does understand the WP_Query p parameter to restrict the search by post ID. However, if you want to search by post ID,…

Indexing trashed posts

By default, Relevanssi does not index trashed posts. If you want to enable searching for trashed posts in the WordPress…

Indexing usermeta fields in Relevanssi

Relevanssi Premium can index user profiles. Users may have meta fields attached to them: there’s a wp_usermeta database table, even…

Indexing with a cron job

I have some trouble with reindexing of new posts. The reason is simple – I sync data into the database…

Polylang Pro: Indexing synced posts

Polylang Pro has a feature to sync translations between posts. The problem with this and Relevanssi is that Relevanssi does…

Polylang: Bilingual search

By default, Relevanssi indexes the different language versions of the posts separately. If your site is in French and English,…

Reading wpDataTables imported tables

The wpDataTables table plugin has several ways to handle tables. Some of them work with Relevanssi without problems; some don’t.…

Restricting the indexing to particular user roles

From the Relevanssi settings, you can only choose whether subscribers are indexed or not. If you need finer control over…

The wrong content gets indexed for a post

Sometimes Relevanssi can get confused and indexes the post content under the wrong post ID. The main symptoms for this…

Utf8mb4 charset and index problems

If you use utf8mb4 charset, Relevanssi database table may be missing an index. That’s because part of the index includes…

Visual Composer: Indexing headings

Relevanssi doesn’t by default index the headings in Visual Composer. The vcex_heading shortcode Visual Composer for the headings stores the…

Visual Composer: Indexing Raw HTML elements

Visual Composer and WP Bakery have a Raw HTML element that can be used to add HTML code to your…

Why is a post type excluded from search?

In the list of post types to index in the Relevanssi indexing settings tab there’s a column “Excluded from search”,…

WooCommerce: Indexing product variation SKUs for main product

Relevanssi can index product and product variation SKUs for WooCommerce products: just add _sku to list of custom fields to…

Languages and characters

German umlauts

By default, the search ignores German umlauts. Searching for “uber” will also find “über” and so on. This ignorance is…

Italian plurals

…or “che”, the ending is changed to “ga” or “ca”, respectively. Then if the word is over three letters long, a final “a”, “e”, “i”, or “o” is stripped. Now…

Korean postpositions

Korean has postpositions, which complicate things for Relevanssi. Fortunately, it’s easy to clean up the most common postpositions from the…

Relevanssi and languages

Relevanssi is language-agnostic in itself. It does not know any language and doesn’t care about which language the site uses.…

Search is ignoring accents

In general, searches ignore accents, which is generally a good idea: for example in French, the difference between e and…

Searching Bible verses

A surprisingly common problem with Relevanssi is Bible verses. All that meaningful punctuation and single digits make exact matching of…

Simple French plurals

If you have Relevanssi Premium and want to make Relevanssi understand French plurals, you can add this code to your…

Performance and security

Debugging slow searches

Reasonable expectations for Relevanssi searching speeds are measured in seconds. Relevanssi does not generally return results in milliseconds. On the…

Effect of Relevanssi on page speed

A Relevanssi customer asked whether Relevanssi can slow down a site. They have a slow site and their hosting provider…

Keyword-based search blocking

Update: In Premium 2.15.0 and later versions, you can do spam blocking from Relevanssi settings. Just navigate to the Spam…

Problems with highlighting in post content

Versions 2.27.5 (Premium) and 4.24.4 (free) added extra security to highlighting search terms in post content. Before that, an attacker…

Plugin compatibility

10Web Photo Gallery

The Photo Gallery plugin from 10Web uses a shortcode to add photo galleries to posts and pages. By default, Relevanssi…

ACF: Field names appearing in excerpts

With Advanced Custom Fields, sometimes Relevanssi picks up custom field names to include in the excerpts. This problem happens when…

ACF: Filtering custom fields by type

On sites where ACF fields are used a lot, with Flexible Content and Repeater fields, it may be difficult to…

ACF: Indexing ACF fields for taxonomy terms

Advanced Custom Fields makes it possible to add custom fields to taxonomy terms. You can only do this with Relevanssi…

ACF: Indexing File field title

I use the ACF field type File for a download section, but the displayed file title is not indexing. The…

ACF: Indexing files from File fields

Relevanssi can index attachment contents from files linked to posts with ACF File fields. This does not happen automatically but…

ACF: Indexing relationship content

If your posts include content from related posts using the Advanced Custom Fields relationship functionality, Relevanssi doesn’t index that content…

Ajax Load More

Ajax Load More is an infinite scrolling plugin for WordPress. It has a Relevanssi extension, but with the current versions…

bbPress: Indexing topics and replies

Relevanssi does work with BBPress. BBPress forums, topics and replies are regular WordPress posts. In order to get Relevanssi working…

bbPress: Private Groups support

Private Groups is a plugin that makes bbPress forum groups private. Relevanssi, however, doesn’t understand that privacy and will show…

Brizy Pro

Brizy is another WordPress site builder and as usual, it too has hard-coded queries that don’t play nice with Relevanssi.…

Chamber Dashboard Business Directory

The Chamber Dashboard Business Directory plugin has a business directory search that’s not compatible with Relevanssi. To disable Relevanssi in…

Co-authors Plus

Co-Authors Plus is a neat plugin that makes it possible to have multiple authors for one post in WordPress. This…

CodeMirror Blocks

CodeMirror Blocks is a good plugin for displaying good-looking code blocks in WordPress (you can see it in action right…

Download Monitor: Index PDF content for parent page

Relevanssi can handle Download Monitor files without significant problems. If you want to use the “Index PDF contents for the…

Elementor

Elementor is a popular page builder. It works rather well with Relevanssi, most of the time. Check for e_search_props If…

EmbedPress autoembeds

EmbedPress has an auto-embed feature that tries to embed all URLs found in posts. This can cause problems with Relevanssi:…

Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a gallery plugin for WordPress. Since it uses a custom post type for the galleries, it works…

Events Calendar: Remove past events from search

If you have events on your site, you might not want to show the past events in the search. This…

FacetWP

Relevanssi is generally well compatible with FacetWP, which provides advanced filtering and faceting capabilities for the search. There are, however,…

FileBird: Filtering attachments by folder

FileBird is one of many WordPress plugins that provide more control over the attachments in the Media Library. You can…

GeneratePress: Query Loop

Relevanssi doesn’t work automatically with the Query Loop block in GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks. Fortunately, the solution is simple: the Query…

Gmedia photo gallery tags

Gmedia photo gallery gives a false impression of working with Relevanssi, as you can see the gmedia_tag taxonomy appear in…

Infinite Scroll from Jetpack

Jetpack has Infinite Scroll, which is a pretty cool feature, but unfortunately doesn’t work with Relevanssi on search results pages.…

Integrating Koko Analytics stats

…the weight calculations is straightforward. The best tool to use is the relevanssi_results filter hook. It lets us modify the weights of the posts. For each post, we calculate a…

Integrating Post Views Counter stats

…in the weight calculations is straightforward. The best tool to use is the relevanssi_results filter hook. It lets us modify the weights of the posts. For each post, we calculate…

Issues with post order plugins

If you’re getting low-quality results and the weight settings are not affecting the results, the first thing to check is…

Membermouse

If you’re using MemberMouse to manage memberships on your site, having Relevanssi co-operate with MemberMouse is easy using the relevanssi_post_ok…

MemberPress Downloads add-on

The Downloads add-on for MemberPress adds downloadable files to MemberPress. These files are stored outside the Media Library, so by…

Metabox

…that can be used to create relationships between posts. If you are interested in indexing these related posts somehow, that does require extra steps since the relationships data is stored…

Oxygen and Ninja Tables

Relevanssi has support both for Oxygen and Ninja Tables, but the way the Ninja Tables support is done, it’s not…

Polylang attachment searching

If Polylang is in use and you haven’t enabled “Media translation“, your attachment files won’t have a language. That’s fine,…

Polylang Pro: Indexing synced posts

Polylang Pro has a feature to sync translations between posts. The problem with this and Relevanssi is that Relevanssi does…

Polylang: Bilingual search

By default, Relevanssi indexes the different language versions of the posts separately. If your site is in French and English,…

PostX Pro

If you use PostX Pro to build a search results template using their Post Grid block, you’ll notice that the…

Profile Builder Pro

Relevanssi can index extra fields created with Profile Builder Pro. All you need to do is add the custom fields’…

PublishPress Revisions: duplicate posts

PublishPress Revisions causes duplicates to appear in Relevanssi search results when a revision is approved. When the revision is created,…

Reading wpDataTables imported tables

The wpDataTables table plugin has several ways to handle tables. Some of them work with Relevanssi without problems; some don’t.…

SearchWP Live Ajax Search

Relevanssi doesn’t ship with a live search or autocomplete feature that would display results as the user types the search…

The Events Calendar: The event search

The event search from The Events Calendar does not work when Relevanssi is enabled. In regular use, it works, but…

Toolset Views

Relevanssi works fine with Toolset, thanks to a lot of compatibility code the makers of Toolset have included in it…

Translation and multilingual plugins

Different translation plugins use different methods for storing the translations, and these methods have varying compatibility with how Relevanssi works…

Ultimate FAQs

Ultimate FAQs is a FAQ plugin that can create FAQs. It has a search, and enabling Relevanssi may break that…

Ultimate Member

Relevanssi generally works well with Ultimate Member and can be used to search Ultimate Member profiles. Ultimate Member doesn’t do…

Unyson

Unyson is a free drag & drop framework. It stores the content in a custom field fw:opt:ext:pb:page-builder:json. While Relevanssi can…

User Access Manager

Relevanssi has a conflict with User Access Manager plugin. Both plugins attach to the same `the_posts` filter hook with the…

Visual Composer: Indexing headings

Relevanssi doesn’t by default index the headings in Visual Composer. The vcex_heading shortcode Visual Composer for the headings stores the…

Visual Composer: Indexing Raw HTML elements

Visual Composer and WP Bakery have a Raw HTML element that can be used to add HTML code to your…

Wishlist Member: Sorting the posts by membership levels

Someone wanted a way to prioritize posts that are targeting particular Wishlist Member membership level. The basic implementation here is…

WooCommerce: Aelia Prices by Country product visibility

Aelia has a Prices by Country for WooCommerce plugin, which can adjust prices based on customer country and hide products…

WooCommerce: Hidden products in search

Relevanssi by default shows out-of-stock and excluded from catalogue WooCommerce products in the search results, but hides those set to…

WooCommerce: Indexing product variation SKUs for main product

Relevanssi can index product and product variation SKUs for WooCommerce products: just add _sku to list of custom fields to…

WooCommerce: Make Relevanssi notice stock changes

In some cases, WooCommerce product stock level changes don’t affect the search immediately. If the search is set up to…

WooCommerce: Popularity and price sorting

Many WooCommerce users use search sorting that allows users to sort by popularity or price. Unfortunately, while Relevanssi works fine…

WooCommerce: Return only exact matches for SKU searches

This little filter function works on relevanssi_hits_filter. When a search query is made that matches an SKU (or any other…

WooCommerce: Searching for orders

Searching for shop orders is tricky with WooCommerce. WooCommerce blocks searching the orders. WooCommerce also keeps the order data in…

WP All Import

By default posts imported with WP All Import do not get indexed by Relevanssi. The importing process does not trigger…

WP Download Manager

WP Download Manager is a popular file management plugin for WordPress. It’s unfortunately incompatible with Relevanssi attachment content reading out…

WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is a popular shopping cart plugin for WordPress. This code by Alexander Gieg, added to functions.php for example,…

WP Event Manager

Using Relevanssi with WP Event Manager requires you to adjust the search process in WP Event Manager a bit. Fortunately,…

WP Job Manager

Relevanssi doesn’t work with the WP Job Manager search. The solution is fortunately simple: you can just disable Relevanssi for…

WPML: Category exclusions

Relevanssi category exclusion setting doesn’t work properly with WPML. Here’s a bit of code from Srdjan Jocić from OnTheGoSystems that…

WPML: Indexing synced posts

When a post is updated, WPML updates all the translations of the post, but Relevanssi only indexes the post that…

WPML: Replacing posts with translations

Here’s a different approach to WPML searching. By default, you have two options. You can include posts in all languages…

YITH Badge Management

The Premium version of YITH Badge Management has a search feature for badges. Using Relevanssi breaks that badge search. Fortunately,…

Yoast Local SEO

Yoast Local SEO plugin breaks Relevanssi search. It enhances the search by adding meta queries. Unfortunately they don’t work with…

Yoast SEO

Starting from versions 2.4.0 (Premium) and 4.3.0 (Free), Relevanssi doesn’t index posts that have been marked “noindex” in the Yoast…

Query variables

Changing the number of search results displayed

A standard way to change the number of search results displayed is something like this: $myquery = "&posts_per_page=5"; $myquery =…

Natural-language date queries

…= date( ‘d’, $time ); $date_query = array( ‘month’ => $month, ‘day’ => $day, ); if ( $use_year ) { $date_query[‘year’] = $year; } $query->set( ‘date_query’, $date_query ); $query->query_vars[‘s’] =…

Searching between dates

…$from_date[‘month’], ‘day’ => $from_date[‘day’], ); } // Same for the “to” date. if ( $to_date && checkdate( $to_date[‘month’], $to_date[‘day’], $to_date[‘year’] ) ) { $before = array( ‘year’ => $to_date[‘year’], ‘month’…

Searching for all descendants of a page

If you want to restrict a search to a page and all it’s children, you can add a post_parent parameter…

Setting post_type to page doesn’t work

For some reason setting the post_type query variable to page doesn’t have the desired effect. Other post types (post, custom…

Search results

Adding a custom field filter in the search

Adding a custom field filter in a Relevanssi search takes a little bit of programming, because the filter needs to…

Adding extra boost for exact title matches

Every now and then, somebody wants to see exact title matches higher in the results. Usually, the best way to…

Adding extra weight to AND results in an OR search

My Relevanssi engine has the AND operator enabled, with a fallback to OR when the search finds no matches. I’d…

Auto-redirecting with one search result

If you want to auto-direct the user directly to the result if there’s just one result for the search, that’s…

Boosting shorter posts with higher keyword density

By default, Relevanssi tends to prefer longer posts. The default TF × IDF weights Relevanssi uses simply count the term…

Category filter for search results pages

Sometimes it’s nice to have a category filter on the search results pages: a simple dropdown where you can choose…

Category title in the search results page

If you’re using category restriction dropdown on your search form, here’s a bit of code that you can add to…

Custom weighing with relevanssi_match and relevanssi_results

Filter search results by date

You can specify date limits on searches with by_date search parameter. Here’s a link you can add to your search results…

Filtering results by category

In order to filter search results by category, use the following code: $url = get_bloginfo('url'); $url = esc_attr(add_query_arg(array('cat' => '10',…

Forced phrase search with fallback

Relevanssi by default does not consider the search query a phrase, or value posts where the words in the search query appear together. Sometimes people do expect that, especially in…

How to block searches without a search term

By default, Relevanssi returns all posts when searching without a search term. That’s the default WordPress behaviour. Sometimes it may…

How to display relevancy score

Relevanssi stores the relevance score it uses to sort results in the $post variable. Just add something like <?php echo…

Integrating Koko Analytics stats

…the weight calculations is straightforward. The best tool to use is the relevanssi_results filter hook. It lets us modify the weights of the posts. For each post, we calculate a…

Integrating Post Views Counter stats

…in the weight calculations is straightforward. The best tool to use is the relevanssi_results filter hook. It lets us modify the weights of the posts. For each post, we calculate…

Modifying the search form on the fly

I set up a short coded search box to search my Learndash e-course for one specific category only:[ searchform ld_topic_category="156"…

Multi-part excerpts

Relevanssi Premium 2.11 introduces a new feature: multi-part excerpts. There’s a new setting on the Excerpts & Highlights settings tab,…

Only return exact title matches if possible

We have posts with titles like “A perfect match”. If a user searches for this exact title, only this post…

Ordering search results by date

I’m building a directory and would like the oldest posts to automatically display first in the search results, is this…

Partial matches to just one custom field

Is it possible to set (with filters and/or actions/functions) Relevanssi to use whole words keyword matching for post titles and…

Pin a post for all searches

Relevanssi Premium has tools for pinning posts for specific queries and all searches where the post appears, but what if…

Put sticky posts first in results

If you want to have sticky posts first in results when they match the search query, just add this code…

Restrict search by author from the search query

You can set Relevanssi to index the post author, which will then let you find posts by searching for the…

Restricting the search for non-logged-in users

There was an interesting support question: I have website with logged-in users as well as non-logged-in users.The logged-in user should…

Scroll result page to the search term

Relevanssi can highlight search terms on the posts. But how about scrolling the page to show the location where the…

Search results breakdown by type

Do you want to have a breakdown of search results by post type? This could be used for example to…

Search results in random order

Do you want to order your search results in random order? Here’s how: add_filter( 'relevanssi_hits_filter', 'shuffle_search' ); function shuffle_search( $hits…

Showing only one recurring event

Some event calendar plugins do recurring events by creating many posts. That’s fine until those cloned posts fill up your search results. This function will only show one of each…

Showing the number of search results

If you want to show the number of search results found on the search results template, you can find the…

Sorting search results

If you want something else than the default relevancy ranking, you can use orderby and order parameters for the search…

Using AND and NOT for Boolean operators

Relevanssi Premium has support for in-query Boolean operators. Relevanssi uses + and – for the operators: cats -dogs and cats…

Using multiple custom taxonomies

Usually, WordPress supports one category, one tag and one taxonomy in the search, if you use the query variables to…

WooCommerce: Return only exact matches for SKU searches

This little filter function works on relevanssi_hits_filter. When a search query is made that matches an SKU (or any other…

Year filter from the search query

A good question was asked in the post Natural-language date queries: Is it possible to extend this so that I…

Shortcodes and tools

Relevanssi Premium as a Composer package

If you want to install Relevanssi Premium as a Composer package, you can use the following URL to fetch the…

Search shortcode

Relevanssi adds a shortcode to help making links to search results. That way users can easily find more information about…