Relevanssi replaces the default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance. It also indexes comments and shortcode content.
| Last updated | October 30, 2026Updated in the last 3 months |
|---|---|
| Tested up to | WordPress 7.1.4Covers WordPress 7.1.4, the current release |
| Needs WordPress | 4.9 or newer |
| Needs PHP | 7.1 or newer |
| First published | June 30, 2009 |
| Support, last two months | 9 of 13 threads resolved (69%) |
4.8 / 5 from 406 reviews
| 5 stars | 370 |
|---|---|
| 4 stars | 12 |
| 3 stars | 4 |
| 2 stars | 4 |
| 1 star | 16 |
Relevanssi replaces the standard WordPress search with a better search engine, with lots of features and configurable options. You’ll get better results, better presentation of results – your users will thank you.
This is the free version of Relevanssi. There’s also Relevanssi Premium, which has added features. For more information about Premium, see Relevanssi.com.
Do note that using Relevanssi may require large amounts (hundreds of megabytes) of database space (for a reasonable estimate, multiply the size of your wp_posts database table by three). If your hosting setup has a limited amount of space for database tables, using Relevanssi may cause problems. In those cases use of Relevanssi cannot be recommended.
Key features
Advanced features
The opening of the plugin's own description. The full text, installation notes and changelog are on its WordPress.org page.
You can find solutions and answers at the Relevanssi Knowledge Base.
Answers to many common problems can be found from the contextual menu. Just click “Help” in the top right corner of your WordPress admin dashboard on the Relevanssi settings page.
If you the results don’t change after installing and activating Relevanssi, the most likely reason is that you have a call to query_posts() on your search results template. This confuses Relevanssi. Try removing the query_posts() call and see what happens.
Please read Words with punctuation can’t be found. This is a Relevanssi feature, but you can fix it from Relevanssi indexing settings.
See the top of the admin menu. There’s ‘User searches’.
Relevanssi stores the relevance score it uses to sort results in the $post variable. Just add something like
echo $post->relevance_score
to your search results template inside a PHP code block to display the relevance score.
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Read from the WordPress.org plugin API on , when WordPress 7.1.4 was the current release. WordPress.org rounds active installs into buckets. These are the directory's figures, not my verdict, and I haven't tested this plugin. The author takes donations at their donate page.