WordPress search runs a LIKE query against your posts table. It is slow on large sites, it ranks results by date rather than relevance, and it finds nothing at all if a visitor misspells a word.

SearchWright hands that job to Typesense, an open source search engine you either self-host or rent. Your content is indexed there; searches are answered from memory in a few milliseconds and tolerate typos.

What it does

Answers the built-in search results page from Typesense, keeping your theme’s template and pagination intact.
Adds an optional instant-results dropdown to any search input on the site.
Indexes posts, pages and any public custom post type, along with taxonomy terms.
Rebuilds without downtime: each rebuild writes to a fresh collection and only switches search over once it finishes.
Keeps the live index current as posts are published, edited, trashed and deleted.
Falls back to the normal WordPress query if the search server cannot be reached, so an outage slows search down rather than breaking the page.

Built to stay out of the way

Your API key is never sent to the browser. Searches are proxied through your own site.
The public endpoint can be restricted to same-origin requests and rate limited per visitor.
No front-end assets load unless instant search is switched on.
Two option rows, both with autoloading disabled. No third-party JavaScript libraries.

WooCommerce

Products are indexed like any other post type, so they turn up in results. Understanding them — price, stock, variations, attributes, faceted filtering — is handled by a separate add-on plugin, which is not included here. Nothing in this plugin is disabled pending a purchase. The extension filters the add-on uses are public and documented under Settings SearchWright WooCommerce, so you are equally free to write your own.

External services

This plugin connects to a Typesense server that you specify in its settings. There is no default server and no connection is made until you enter a hostname and an API key.

What is sent, and when:

On indexing: the title, excerpt, body text, permalink, featured image URL, author display name, publish date and assigned taxonomy terms of each post you have chosen to index. This happens when you run a rebuild, and when a post is created, edited, trashed or deleted.
On searching: the visitor’s search term, along with paging and filtering parameters.

Where that data goes is entirely determined by the host you configure. If you use Typesense Cloud, that is Typesense’s hosted service, governed by their terms of service and privacy policy. If you run Typesense on your own hardware, the data does not leave your infrastructure.

This plugin makes no other outbound requests. It does not phone home and it collects no analytics.