CelerSearch – Lightning Fast Search with Meilisearch

CelerSearch routes WordPress search through Meilisearch. Sub-50ms responses, typo tolerance, autocomplete, highlighting, and full WooCommerce support — with an admin UI built for day-to-day use, not just setup.

🔍 Search

• Millisecond results on any site size
• Typo tolerance and stemming out of the box
• Live, paginated autocomplete as users type
• Match highlighting on titles and excerpts
• Category, tag, and custom-taxonomy filtering
• Pin documents at fixed positions for chosen queries (per-index Rules)
• Custom search results pages via Views + block/shortcode
• Native WordPress search fallback when Meilisearch is unreachable

🗂 Indexing

• Posts, pages, any custom post type
• WooCommerce products (including variations) and orders
• Real-time sync on publish, update, trash, and watched meta changes
• Manual rebuild with configurable batch size
• Per-index searchable, filterable, sortable attributes + synonyms — all editable in the admin
• Content splitting for long posts (configurable; Meilisearch deduplicates results)

🌐 Where search runs

• Frontend site search (replace the default results page with a custom View)
• Admin list search (posts, products, media)
• REST API search (headless/decoupled setups)
• AJAX-faceted WooCommerce shop & archive filters

📊 Analytics (opt-in)

• See your top queries and which ones return zero results, so you can fix content gaps
• Daily query-volume trend per index over 7/30/90-day windows
• Off by default and fully private — data stays in your own database, with bounded retention (see Privacy & Data below)

🎯 Use cases

• WooCommerce stores with thousands of orders — native admin order search slows to a crawl and misses matches as the orders table grows. Enable the “WooCommerce Admin Orders Search” area and lookups stay instant at any scale.
• Product catalogs with rich attributes — drive shop and category archives with AJAX-faceted filters for color, size, brand, price, plus typo-tolerant keyword search.
• Content-heavy sites (news, blogs, documentation) — replace the frontend search with live autocomplete and fuzzy matching so readers find posts by typing a few characters.
• Custom post types at scale — directories, job boards, listings. Native WP search is a slow LIKE '%…%' across a handful of columns; CelerSearch indexes every field and ranks by relevance.

🧑‍💻 Developer-friendly

• 40+ filter hooks across indexing, search, and results
• Extend with your own index types (celersearch_supported_indices)
• Custom search-area types (celersearch_area_types) for BuddyPress, LearnDash, etc.
• Taxonomy-aware queries translate WP_Query tax_query to the engine filter syntax

Full documentation at docs.celersearch.com.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0+
• PHP 8.1+
• A Meilisearch instance — self-host on your VPS, or get a managed one at celersearch.com from $10/mo.

🚀 Getting started

After activation a welcome notice points you to the setup flow:

1. Stand up Meilisearch — self-host (guide) or use celersearch.com
2. Add the service under CelerSearch → Services
3. Create an index under CelerSearch → Indices and rebuild it
4. Enable the relevant search area under CelerSearch → Settings

Privacy & Data

CelerSearch does not phone home and does not send any data to third-party services. All search queries are forwarded only to the Meilisearch (or future Typesense) instance you configure under CelerSearch → Services.

The optional Analytics feature (off by default; opt-in under CelerSearch → Settings → Analytics) stores each performed search in your own WordPress database so you can see what visitors search for. When enabled it records:

• The search term (the text typed by the visitor)
• The matching index, area type, and the number of results returned
• The search engine that served the request (e.g. meilisearch) and a timestamp

IP addresses, user identifiers, session tokens, referrers, and user-agent strings are never stored. Retention is bounded by a configurable window (default 30 days, range 7–365) and a daily background job prunes older rows automatically. You can disable Analytics at any time and clear all collected data from the Settings page. Uninstalling the plugin drops the analytics table entirely.