Search Sucks: Why Nobody Can Find Your Content (And How to Fix It)

It is the quickest way to lose a customer.

A user lands on your site. They know exactly what they want. They go to the magnifying glass icon and type “iphone 15 pro”. WordPress replies: “No results found.”

Why? Because the product title was “Apple Smartphone 15 Pro” and the user made a typo, or because the specific model name was hidden inside a Custom Field.

The native WordPress search engine is blind. It was designed in 2003 for simple blogs. It searches the Title and the Body Content. That’s it.

If you follow the AgilePress philosophy (using structured data via Custom Post Types and ACF), the native search is useless. It cannot read your data.

Here is how we fix the broken search experience based on the type of project.

The Problem: WordPress Ignores Your Data

Before installing plugins, you must understand why it fails:

1. The ACF Blind Spot: If you have a “Real Estate” CPT and store the City or Price in an ACF field, WordPress doesn’t see it.
2. No “Fuzziness”: If a user types “iphoen”, WordPress won’t show “iPhone”. It demands exact matches.
3. No PDFs: If you have an intranet with documentation in PDF, WordPress searches the title of the file, not the content inside.

Solution A: The Essential Choice (Small & Medium Sites)

Target: Corporate websites, Blogs, Portfolios.

The Tool: Relevanssi (Free Version).

For 80% of websites, the free version of Relevanssi is the perfect fix. It replaces the default WordPress search logic with a better internal index.

• Why we use it: It creates an index of your database that includes Custom Fields (ACF). Finally, your data is searchable.
• The “Fuzzy” Logic: It understands partial matches.
• The Trade-off: Since the index lives in your database, if you have 50,000 posts, your database will grow significantly. For standard sites, this is negligible.

Solution B: The “Document” Heavy & Intranets

Target: Intranets, Universities, Law Firms, Complex Directories.

The Tool: SearchWP (Paid).

If your organization relies on documents, Relevanssi isn’t enough. You need SearchWP. It is the gold standard for on-site search processing.

• The Killer Feature (PDF Indexing): SearchWP reads the content inside PDF, Office, and text documents stored in your Media Library.
  • Scenario: An employee searches for “holiday policy clause 4”. SearchWP scans the PDF and returns the exact document.
• The “Zero Results” Log: It tells you what users are searching for but not finding. This is pure business intelligence to improve your content.
• Page Builder Support: It integrates deeply with builders like Elementor or Divi better than most free alternatives.

Solution C: The E-commerce Specialist (WooCommerce)

Target: Online Stores.

The Tool: FiboSearch.

In E-commerce, speed is money. Users don’t want to hit “Enter” and wait for a results page. They want to see the product image while they are typing (Live Search).

Here, we must distinguish between the Engine (Logic) and the Interface (UI).

Scenario 1: Simple Store (Standard Products)

If you just sell T-shirts and the product name is in the title, use FiboSearch (Free or Pro) as a standalone plugin.

• It handles the logic.
• It provides a beautiful, fast AJAX search bar with thumbnails and prices.

Scenario 2: Complex Store (Technical Parts / ACF)

If you sell “Car Parts” and the Year/Model compatibility is in ACF fields, FiboSearch’s internal engine might struggle.

• The Agile Stack: We install SearchWP (or Relevanssi) as the “Engine” to handle the heavy logic (indexing ACF).
• Then, we install FiboSearch purely as the “Interface.”
• Result: You get the deep data mining of SearchWP combined with the beautiful visual speed of FiboSearch. Best of both worlds.

Solution D: The Enterprise Scale (SaaS)

Target: Massive sites (10k+ products), High Traffic, Global Audience.

The Tool: Algolia.

When you have 50,000 products and thousands of users searching at once, running search queries on your own server (SQL) will crash your site.

• How it works: We offload the search to the cloud. When a user types, the request goes to Algolia’s servers, not yours.
• The Speed: It returns results in milliseconds (Google-like speed), regardless of your server load.
• The Cost: It is a monthly SaaS fee and requires developer implementation (or plugins like WP Search with Algolia), but for large scale, it is mandatory.

Conclusion: Search is Conversion

Don’t treat the search bar as a utility. It is a sales tool.

Users who search convert 2x to 3x higher than users who browse. If your search bar returns “No Results” because of a typo or a hidden ACF field, you are leaving money on the table.

• Standard Site? Install Relevanssi.
• Intranet/PDFs? Buy SearchWP.
• WooCommerce? Install FiboSearch (and map it to SearchWP if needed).
• Enterprise? Go Algolia.