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Making WordPress Search a Party

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Speakers

Josh Koenig

Co-Founder & Head of Developer Experience,Pantheon

Joe Dooley

Lead Developer,The CRUSH Agency

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Why is Search Important?

● Average conversion went from 1.7% to 2.4% with on-site search.1

● Only 37% of users who search find what they are looking for.2

● 75% of users don’t go past page one of search results.1

1, http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/14416/100-Awesome-Marketing-Stats-Charts-Graphs-Data.aspx2. http://www.uie.com/articles/users_search_once/

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Why is Search Important?

● Huge opportunity for engagement / conversion.

● Status quo is not great: easy to beat expectations.

● Site search can provide valuable analytics insights.

● Surface usability issues.

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WordPress Default Search

If you’re using WP as a content-management system instead of just running a small blog, the basic search will leave you in trouble. The default WordPress search leaves you without your best search results first.

Default WP Search can be summed up as - Find any post that mentions these keywords in the post title or content and return them ordered by date descending.

- The search lists the results in date order, latest first. This is rarely useful.- Searches for the exact query, nothing less and nothing more.- No Site Network search capabilities

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Existing Search Platforms - Pros and Cons

Relevanssi - replaces the default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance. Indexes comments and shortcode content.

Search & Filter Pro - Search by custom fields, post meta, taxonomies, tags, categories, authors, post types, post dates.

FacetWP - Amazon-like filtering to any WordPress content listing. It allows users to quickly browse and drill-down through your site's content to find exactly what they're looking for.

Google Custom Search - Effective, but has a number of drawbacks that force concessions when it comes to design. There’s a branded search field, search results have ads (unless you pay to get them off), and it’s sometimes really difficult to give search the attention you’ve afforded everywhere else.

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Some ExamplesAvedro - The World Leader in Corneal Cross-Linking Science

Problem: We needed a premium WordPress search solution that allowed us to search and filter by custom post type.

Solution: The only solution was a premium plugin, Search and Filter Pro.

This was time consuming because we had to evaluate the pros and cons of each plugin and figure out how to use each plugin.

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MySQL is not a Search Engine

● It’s not WordPress’s fault.● Relational databases are

designed for transactions, and to index / join on keys.

● Full-text indexing exists, but performs horribly.

● Matching doesn’t mean relevant.

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All About Solr

● Solr is an open source enterprise search engine

● Built on Apache Lucene

● Talks to websites over HTTP API

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All About Solr

● Used by some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the internet

● Advanced capabilities like full-text search, faceted search, geo-spatial search

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All About Solr

Faster than WordPress default search

More accurate matching

Scales to billions of documents

Features like spell check, highlighting, faceting, built in

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Things You Can Do With Solr

Have an awesome search experience

cnet.com

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Things You Can Do With Solr

Related content widgets

freepeople.com

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Things You Can Do With Solr

Turbocharge WP_Query performance

Default Search

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Things You Can Do With Solr

Autocompletes and other UI improvements

sears.com

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Solr Challenges

● Java infrastructure● Complex XML configuration● No security or authentication

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Pantheon’s Solr Backend Service

● We provide a separate index for every environment

● Authentication and encryption is automatic

● Zero configuration: the search service “just works”

● Used by 1000s of Drupal sites (and a few WP sites) already

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Pantheon’s New Solr Plugin for WordPress

● Beta version coming to WordPress.org plugin directory soon.

● The alpha developer version is available now on GitHub.

● Anyone can use the plugin as long as you provide a backend to run it on.

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● Your visitors deserve a killer search experience.● WordPress’ default search can only go so far — it lacks

in relevance, scalability, and speed.● There are many options for search plugins and services.● Pantheon is releasing an open source Solr plugin - use

it with your own backend or run it on Pantheon.

Summary - Search Matters

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Summary - For Agencies

Consistency - developers will know how to useSolr on each and every site.Clients - We’re able to provide our clients with a turnkey solution for a first-class search experience.

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Try It Now

https://github.com/pantheon-systems/solr-for-wordpress

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Questions?