Checklist

Are all posts indexed? In Relevanssi indexing settings, does the number of indexed posts match the total number of posts on your site? Are all necessary post types selected?

Solution: Review your indexing settings and rebuild the index.

By default, Relevanssi does not index words shorter than three characters. Punctuation is also removed during indexing.

Solution: Adjust the minimum word length in Settings → Relevanssi → Indexing → Advanced indexing options and rebuild the index afterwards.

Stopwords are ignored by Relevanssi and will not return any results.

Solution: Remove the word from the stopword list under Settings → Relevanssi → Stopwords and rebuild the index.

Use the Relevanssi Debugger (Settings → Relevanssi → Debugging) to check if the word appears in the indexed post.

If the word is present, the issue lies elsewhere. If not, review your indexing settings.

Test your search using the Relevanssi Admin Search in the dashboard. If it finds the results, your frontend search is not using Relevanssi.

The most effective way to investigate is by using Query Monitor to debug the query sent to Relevanssi.

Live search is often hardcoded to use the default WordPress search instead of Relevanssi.

Note for Flatsome users: See these instructions.

Relevanssi does not natively understand word stems. Searching for “hamster” can return “hamsters” with partial matching enabled, but not vice versa.

Best solution: Use the Relevanssi Snowball Stemmer add-on, which supports multiple languages and handles word stemming properly.

The migration likely didn’t include the wp_relevanssi database table. To restore it, temporarily add the following code to your site:

relevanssi_create_database_tables( 0 );

Reload your admin dashboard once, then remove the code. This should recreate the necessary Relevanssi tables.

Multisite installations require modifications to the search results template. See the instructions here.