SearchWP is a relatively new plugin from Jonathan Christopher that claims to be “The Best WordPress Search Plugin You Can Find”. In this video review I walk through the plugin and demonstrate how it works and just what it can do for your WordPress search.
This is one plugin that absolutely does not disappoint. I’d go as far as to say it’s one of the best plugins I’ve used in a long time.
The plugin starts at $49 for a single site and goes up to $129 for 5 sites, and $249 for an unlimited license.
My Rating: 
OK, you’ve convinced me. Most of my clients are chomping at the bit for something like this. I’m going to buy a single license right now and install it on a test site. Thanks for the great info and fantastic video overview. Very nicely done!
Glad to help! I’ve actually just activated SearchWP on this site and it has made a HUGE difference in terms of the relevance of the results.
Awesome! Please let me know if you hit any snags along the way, I do my best to answer Support tickets as soon as I can. I hope you enjoy the plugin!
I forgot to mention in the video, there is also a top-notch Search Statistics page under the main Dashboard menu that provides a graph and table of searches and results.
it looks promising, How would you compare it to Relevanssi Premium ?
I have never used Relevanssi Premium so I cannot say, though I have found much better results with SearchWP than the free version of Relevanssi.
I haven’t used Relevanssi Premium either but SearchWP’s approach is quite different than Relevanssi. If you’re looking for more fine grained control over keyword weight SearchWP might be a better option for you, but from what I’ve heard many people are satisfied with Relevanssi. SearchWP solves a few extra pain points for me and hopefully other developers, and Pippin covered those differences really well in the review. If they look to be something you might like to integrate in your currently-Relevanssi-powered website, SearchWP might be the ticket!
Thank you so much for the extensive video review, Pippin! I’m glad you’re enjoying the plugin so far. Version 1.1 is close to being released, along with a few new Extensions I’m really excited about.
I can’t wait to see what else you have in store for us.
bought it and love it, cant wait for new version and extensions 😉
I’ve been really happy with SearchWP also so far. I’m gonna put it in real test on a custom site soon.
Absolutely love the look of this and I’ll be picking up a copy very soon.
Thanks for the tip. Been searching for a good search plugin for WordPress. Will this solve the “strict search” problem in WordPress. Today, if you have an article with title “How to install the search engine”, and you search for “how to install search” you get this article as a result, but if you search for “how to activate the search engine” you do not get it as a result, even though 5 of my search terms are in the title. Today, if one search term is not in the article, you do not get a result. This is too strict and has annoyed me for months. Makes WordPress useless as a knowledge base or help desk…
This will definitely help a lot 🙂
This is precisely one of the issues I aimed to solve with SearchWP. The algorithm actually breaks up search queries into separate terms and compares them to the weights you define on the settings page, aiming to give the most relevant results possible. With Extensions like Fuzzy Matches and Term Synonyms you won’t have to worry about restricted results!
This is really helpful. Thanks for the article.
Looks very nice this Search plug in! It’s clear what the web admin can do with it. But how can a common web visitor use it? I want my visitors to be able to find key words within pdf docs in a web library. What kind of Search dialog do they see? From the video I can only see the admin dialog.
Kind regards
Ruud, Eindhoven Netherlands
Hi Ruud! SearchWP takes over the default WordPress search fields in your theme. Pippin didn’t need to change an thing in his theme when he was showing how the search was performing, SearchWP takes over in the background and utilizes the native WordPress search form and results page, including the search Widget. I hope that helps!
Has anyone answered the part of your question about pdf docs?
Hi Spence! In regards to PDFs showing up in search results, SearchWP will include a result to a PDF just like it would any other post type. SearchWP only indexes PDFs in the Media library, so since it’s in the Media library it has a title, a permalink, etc. that SearchWP will use just like any other search result. Does that help clarify?
Sure! Thanks! It’s even easier than I thought. Going to try it out for that price.
Grtz,
Ruud
Hi. Looking for search plugin that can search images only by tags or titles or ….
Can SearchWP do it ? No text Images only.
And if yes where SearchWP will search images ? in posts , portfolio or Media library …
Thank you
Boris
Hi Boris, yes, you could build such a configuration. It would be a matter of un-checking all of the post types on the settings screen and only checking Media. You can also set the weights of Media attributes (title, taxonomies, etc) one by one to set up what you’re looking for. If you want to exclude certain things you just set their weight to zero.
SearchWP indexes Media entries in the WordPress Media library only.
Hi Jonathan,
Thank you for quick response.
2 more question. After I wrote you I find this article about SearchWP
http://youneedfat.com/searchwp-genesis-image-search/
This exactly what I looking for.
demo: http://youneedfat.com/image-search-demo/
1. without this supplemental your plugin do the same ?
2. if not what you think about this supplemental
Thank you again
Boris
Hi Boris, very sorry for taking so long to reply! Yes the default search engine can include images in results.
Hi Jonathan,
Just like Boris, I’d love to know if you’ve had experience with a image search and display of a grid like search result.
I just purchased the plugin, and would have no issue giving some money to the hard working people selling Genesis Framework, but I read that they are having issues with pagination, which would be important for me.
Any lead or push in the right direction would be appreciated.
Best,
Franck
Hi Franck, SearchWP doesn’t handle any of the results output, it’s all up to how you customize your theme; results can be output in any way you’d like. Pagination in Genesis with SearchWP results works just fine, it just requires some additional code if you are using a supplemental search engine but if you’re using the default search engine it all works out of the box. Here are some SearchWP threads regarding pagination in Genesis: https://searchwp.com/?s=genesis+pagination
This Plugin is awesome and it really very useful and i have recommend this to all my friends.
Great job!!!!
On the search results page, is it possible to split the results coming from wordpress posts and bbpress topic posts? That way, it is easy to differentiate both types of results, and each section has a label such as: Posts, Forum Topics. Let me know. Thanks. I am very interested.
Hi Robert, yes it is, SearchWP literally intercepts the native WordPress search so you can do things like call get_post_type() as you iterate through The Loop and apply any district styling/customization you’d like.
Hi Jonathan, thanks for the fast reply. I am not a coder so I am wondering if your control panel has easy options and checkboxes so we can choose to display all search results together or be able to separate them out by post types such as normal posts, forum posts, etc. and make our own headings. Is that a feature in SearchWP and / or are you considering it? A way for noncoders to dress-up the search results would be great!