Relevanssi Light replaces the default WP search with a search that uses the fulltext indexing capabilities of the database. It requires a modern version of MySQL or MariaDB.
Relevanssi Light is very powerful, as it leverages your database to do all the hard work. Even large sites will return relevant results quickly and efficiently. Indexing is fully automatic and always handled by your database server.
Thanks to Otto Kekäläinen (ottok) for the original idea, development push, and all the feedback.
Feedback is welcome. I follow the support forums here, but you can also post an issue on the Relevanssi Light GitHub page. That’s where the active development happens.
Comparison between Relevanssi Light and Relevanssi
Relevanssi Light is a simple, easy-to-use tool with limited capabilities. It provides very fast search results with better quality, but with little room for customization and adjustment.
Relevanssi is a full-fledged search solution that offers lots of features and full control over the search index and the search results. It generates useful excerpts with the search terms highlighted, can provide “Did you mean” suggestions, keeps logs and much more. Indexing and searching is much slower than with Relevanssi Light.
Relevanssi Premium adds more features to Relevanssi: it can index user profiles, taxonomy terms, and PDF content, generate related posts lists and more.