I’ve just switched the search feature of this website to Algolia and the improvements are staggering! Feel free to give the search feature of this website a test and you’ll see that results are now instant and more accurate than ever.
Algolia is the search-as-a-service platform that enables companies of all sizes to deliver fast and relevant digital experiences that drive real results.
algolia.com
Algolia has a Free plan which allows you to have up to 10,000 search requests a month so you too can turbocharge the search feature of your website to give your users a good search experience.
Today I’ll be writing a guide on how you can do this for your WordPress powered website.
A Quick Note:
Algolia used to have an official WordPress plugin but it has been discontinued as of May 2, 2019.
Thanks to the power of open source, a developer called WebDevStudios stepped in, forked the plugin and they’ve committed to continue maintaining and developing the plugin called WP Search with Algolia.
To get started, first sign up for the Free plan from Algolia’s website.
Then, login to your WordPress Admin > Plugins > Add New and search for: WP Search with Algolia
Click Install Now and then Activate.
Look for Algolia Search on the left bar of your WordPress Admin and click on Settings under it:
To obtain the Application ID, Search-Only API Key and Admin API Key, head over to Algolia’s Dashboard > API Keys page:
After inputting the details and click Save Changes, now head over to the Autocomplete page in your WordPress Admin:
Check the box for Enable autocomplete. You’ll also see quite a few indexes under Configuration especially if you have third-party plugins installed. For a normal WordPress website, you can select All posts, Posts and Pages.
After clicking Save Changes, you’ll be asked to index the indexes that you selected by clicking Index now. This will transmit the indexes to Algolia’s servers for indexing. You will only need to do this once for each index and any new posts or pages you created will be automatically transmitted to Algolia’s servers.
Finally, head over to the Search Page and select Use Algolia with Instantsearch.js which will replace the default WordPress search page with an instant search experience powered by Algolia:
And we’re done!
You can now try the search feature at the frontend of your WordPress website and get ready to be amazed by how quickly the search results are shown and how accurate they are!
