Polylang vs Super Speedy Search

Dave Hilditch •

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Comparing Polylang with Super Speedy Search? This page breaks down the key differences and similarities so you can find the best fit for your WordPress or WooCommerce store.

Overview of Polylang

Polylang is a multilingual plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce that adds language-switching capabilities across your content. Its search integration filters results by the active language rather than enhancing search relevance, meaning the underlying search engine remains WordPress's default LIKE-based query — slow on large catalogues and lacking typo tolerance or relevancy ranking.

Visit Polylang →

How Super Speedy Search differs from Polylang

All plugins from Super Speedy Plugins share a SQL-first architecture and an uncompromising focus on performance — and Super Speedy Search is no different. Here is what sets it apart:

Shoppers leave when search is slow, irrelevant or cannot find the words they use. Super Speedy Search replaces WordPress’s table-scanning search with a dedicated index, then lets you control what matches and what ranks first.

How to choose between Polylang and Super Speedy Search?

Polylang is excellent for managing multilingual content, but it does not improve the underlying search engine — your customers are still searching through slow LIKE queries with no relevancy ranking or typo tolerance. Super Speedy Search integrates with Polylang and replaces the search engine itself, delivering fast, relevant results in whichever language your visitor is browsing. Built on a SQL-first architecture and validated against one-million-product catalogues, it is the natural upgrade for multilingual WooCommerce stores. A free trial is available to test on staging.

What do others say about Super Speedy Search?

★★★★★
Michael Aronoff — September 2026

Super Speedy Search + Scalability Pro are an amazing combo for any WooCommerce site. The Ajax search of Super Speedy Search is a game changer that can make your site stand out from others and also get users to the correct item amazingly fast. I also highly recommend Super Speedy Imports if you have any recurring import jobs. We had an import that took over an hour that now takes less than 3 minutes. No exaggeration. Over 8000 items fully updated in just a few minutes. Truly Amazing!

★★★★★
Shawn Tjai — September 2021

Our current WP websites have been really laggy and despite switching to more powerful servers, we kept encountering bottlenecks until we found WPI. We are currently using Super Speedy Search + Scalability Pro and it has been phenomenal with the performance improvements! Across 2 of our websites on 1 server, we are looking at 90k MAU with 6k products total. Dave has also been a great help with any bugs during the setup process – really speedy response and he sure knows what he is doing!

★★★★★
marinblu0000 — May 2022

Amazing plugin to create comprehensive and the fastest search for WP. It looks great and does exactly what the information says it will! After testing many pro search plugin, we found that SuperSpeedSearch was the only that could handle the amount of our products (300k+)! The support we received was fantastic–very timely and helpful! Any question & problem we’ve had has been answered & resolved. We were looking for a very advanced plugin and this plugin has helped us do just about everything we were looking for and more. Keep going wpintense team!!!

What's new in Super Speedy Search?

5.95.0 (28th October 2026)

  • Fixed products and posts saved in the first hour after installing not appearing in search, on sites with a persistent object cache such as Redis.
  • Faster strict SKU searches for words with an apostrophe, such as "Women's", which are now searched as ordinary words, and a SKU containing an apostrophe, such as `QF-6'-STEP`, now finds only that SKU under strict SKU search.
  • Fixed Ajax dropdown prices showing too few decimals, such as 48 as "48€" and 48.05 as "48,5€", when Fast Ajax runs without WooCommerce selected.
  • Rewrote the wp-admin user search so security scanners such as Jetpack Scan no longer flag it.
  • Fixed the wp-admin user search with a role filter selected, and the Quick Edit author list on a searched Posts screen, when *Override User Search* is on.
  • Fixed results that tie on relevance and title, such as two products with the same name, coming back in a different order from one identical search to the next; ties are now ordered by ID, so the dropdown and each results page always show the same items.
  • Faster searches for possessive words such as "Women's", "Men's" or "Kids'", which now find the same products without an extra phrase search; relevance scores for these searches are slightly lower.
  • Fixed product searches returning no results, with the database error "isn't in GROUP BY", when the database runs with `ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY` and variations are not grouped under their product, for every sort order including price.
  • Faster searches when Meta Weight is switched off or a weighted field's factor is 0: that field's full-text match is no longer run, and scores are unchanged.
  • Added "Score each weighted field with one full-text match instead of two" under Large Catalogues and Archives, which is faster on broad searches but changes relevance scores; off by default.
  • Faster relevance searches with many results: the posts table is now read only for the results on the requested page, with the same results, order and totals.
  • Added a Cancel Superseded Searches setting beside Fast Ajax, off by default: while a shopper types, each keystroke's dropdown search stops the previous keystroke's database query for that search box, with an optional time limit for any dropdown search (off unless you set one); a dropdown search it stops is recorded in the PHP error log with its post type, time taken and the limit.
  • Added the setting "Skip searches made only of words shorter than 3 characters" under Large Catalogues and Archives, off by default: when ticked, a search such as "re" or "xs" returns no products instead of reading the whole index, while "dress xl" and "cable 2m" still match as before.
  • Added Taxonomy Term Meta Exclusions to the Main settings tab, so category, brand and attribute searches can ignore term meta such as image IDs, social image URLs and SEO plugin settings; new installs get a recommended list, existing sites keep searching all term meta until you press Use the recommended list, save and rebuild. Developers can add keys with the `sspsss_term_meta_excluded_keys` filter. Rank Math and SEOPress SEO titles and descriptions stay searchable with exclusions in use, without their template variables such as %sep% or %%sitetitle%%.
View full changelog →

Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.

Get Super Speedy Search →

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