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Enterprise Search

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.

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

Enterprise Search is an Integration available to all WordPress environments and can be activated in the VIP Dashboard. Enterprise Search indexes and features can be managed with VIP-CLI. Search Dev Tools and the VIP-CLI health command are provided to assist with debugging and troubleshooting.

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

  • Query warnings in application logs

    Enterprise Search writes a warning to an environment’s application logs when an Elasticsearch query is slow or has no limiting search condition. Each warning is written as a pair of log lines that both start with VIP_SEARCH_QUERY_WARNING: a machine-readable line of fields, and a human-readable line that describes the request and the location in the site’s code that issued the query. Warnings can be reviewed in Runtime Logs in the VIP Dashboard or with Runtime Logs with VIP-CLI. Warnings from web requests appear in Application Logs. Warnings from WP-CLI commands and cron events appear in Batch Logs. Reading a warning…

  • 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.

  • Activate 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.

  • 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.

  • Debug with Enterprise Search Dev Tools

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

  • Enterprise Search on multisite

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

  • 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.

Last updated: June 25, 2025

Relevant to

  • WordPress