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Enterprise Search

VIP Enterprise Search was developed by WordPress VIP to expand the usage of Elasticsearch, providing both a search solution and a performance-enhancing layer to existing WordPress searches and queries.

In Enterprise Search, a fork of ElasticPress provides Elasticsearch indexing and search, and a fork of es-wp-query provides query offloading capabilities via an Enterprise Search adapter.

The Enterprise Search feature is enabled via code and its features can be enabled by VIP-CLI. Enterprise Search indexes can be indexed and versioned with VIP-CLI. Search Dev Tools and the VIP-CLI health command are available to assist with debugging and troubleshooting.

Enterprise Search can also be enabled in a VIP Local Development Environment.

  • Limitations of Enterprise Search

    Enterprise Search can improve the performance of search results for a WordPress site, but limitations exist and default behaviors should be reviewed.

  • Enable Enterprise Search

    To fully enable Enterprise Search, the feature must be code-enabled then an Elasticsearch (ES) index for a site’s content is created using CLI commands.

  • Enable Enterprise Search features

    Enterprise Search features such as facets, related posts, terms, and more can be enabled per site with custom WP-CLI commands run with VIP-CLI.

  • Index with Enterprise Search

    Indexing compiles a site’s content and inserts it into an Elasticsearch (ES) index. Indexing can be triggered with a VIP-CLI command.

  • Version with Enterprise Search

    Versioning makes it possible to perform a reindex of an Elasticsearch index and check the health of the new index before replacing the current index.

  • Check the index health

    Use VIP-CLI to check if an index is in sync with a database, or to debug issues related to Enterprise Search.

  • Choose what to index

    By default, Enterprise Search will index all public post types, their statuses and their public taxonomy terms. Use allow lists and indexables to selectively index additional post types, statuses, taxonomies, and post meta.

  • Offload a WP_Query to Enterprise Search

    Enterprise Search automatically sends all standard front-end search queries to Elasticsearch. Non-standard queries can also be offloaded to Elasticsearch by adding custom code that modifies the behavior of WP_Query.

  • Debug with Enterprise Search Dev Tools

    Enterprise Search has built-in Search Dev Tools that are useful for testing individual queries and debugging.

  • Search tokenization

    Tokenization applies a more sophisticated set of rules during a search, which eliminate the need for full-text search and also returns more relevant document results. The behavior of tokenization can be customized with filters.

  • Enable Enterprise Search for the WordPress Admin

    Enterprise Search can be optionally enabled for WordPress Admin dashboard queries using custom code and filters.

  • Rate limiting in Enterprise Search

    Rate limiting of Enterprise Search can occur if too many of the same queries are made directly to Elasticsearch (ES) rather than effectively utilizing caching.

  • Enterprise Search on multisite

    An Elasticsearch (ES) index must be created for each network site that will be using Enterprise Search for search queries.

  • Customize search results

    Customize the search results that are generated by Enterprise Search by configuring options such as sorting by date, relevancy, fuzziness, and more.

Last updated: May 26, 2025

Relevant to

  • WordPress