Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
Get Super Speedy Search →Comparing ElasticPress 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 ElasticPress
ElasticPress integrates Elasticsearch with WordPress and WooCommerce for fast, accurate, and relevant search at scale. It offloads search queries to a dedicated Elasticsearch index, dramatically reducing database load.
How Super Speedy Search differs from ElasticPress
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:
Super Speedy Search brings fast and relevant search results to your users and your oft-forgotten site admins. Don’t pull your hair out with basic search which matches too many things, and doesn’t sort them properly.
Our search weights are fully customizable, and we even have our own custom-coded ajax handler to bring ULTRA-fast ajax to your WordPress website.
How to choose between ElasticPress and Super Speedy Search?
If you're fed up with plugin updates slowing down your site — and wondering whether ElasticPress's developers ever test against stores with large catalogues — it might be time for a change. Every release of Super Speedy Search is performance-tested against a one-million-product WooCommerce store to guarantee sub-second response times across every page. Migration is more straightforward than you might expect, and a free trial means you can evaluate the difference on your staging server with zero risk.
What do others say about Super Speedy Search?
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!
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!!!
I have been using Scalability Pro (also made by WP Intense) for a good few years now with no complaints and recently added Super Speedy Search and their Super Speedy Filters to our site. Super Speedy Search is working great on our site which has a hundred or so products, but the products have quite a lot of variations on them. Previously loading the full search results page was getting quite slow. Now with Super Speedy Search, when the customer hits enter or clicks to see all of the products from their search results it displays that page much quicker than any other plugin we have used previously. I'm very pleased with this, it is like some sort of performance wizardry! Customer service is great too and being able to get help from the discord server is very quick and convenient.
Super Speedy Search Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →- How to add extra meta fields to Woo Product Admin search
- How to check if Super Speedy Search is working
- How to format dates in Ultra Ajax output
- How to get Super Speedy Search working with other search forms
- How to hide or show items in search results
- Search is slow when using WooCommerce Tab Manager
- Styling Super Speedy Search Form
- Adjusting Super Speedy Search Weights
- Ajax Search Panel – Super Speedy Search Settings
- Getting Maximum Speed from Super Speedy Search
- How to add the Super Speedy Search widget into your header
- Installing and configuring Super Speedy Search
- Main Super Speedy Search Settings
- Meta Search – Super Speedy Search Settings
- Narrowing Super Speedy Search results with filters
- How to increase the search ranking position of search phrases with short tokens
- Super Speedy Search settings page is slow to load or times out, or there are too many meta keys on the SSS settings page
- The fulltext index fails to create on wp_posts
- The Super Speedy Search form is displaying above hover menus
- Upstream sent too big header
Articles about Super Speedy Search
View all articles →- Bug fix sprint
- December Development Update
- Manual update for Super Speedy Search required
- More speed, more updates, and a bit of a roadmap for our plugins
- More beta updates available
- Beta downloads and historic plugin versions now in your account
- Upgrades to multiple Super Speedy Plugins plugins now in beta
- Dev Diary #7
- Dev Diary #2
- Update to Super Speedy Search released
What's new in Super Speedy Search?
5.48 (6th March 2026)
- Added new elevated search privileges option to Additional Options tab so admins can choose which other roles get to see private and out of stock items all the time
- Added common meta key exclusions to Meta Search query to avoid flooding admin tab with useless meta keys no-one will ever want to search
5.47 (4th March 2026)
- Added language column to terms table for polylang taxonomy suggestions – table rebuild required to use new fix
- Improved polylang integration
- Added admin auth cookies to Ultra ajax to allow admins to search private items from ajax
- Altered ajax to detect user permissions to allow admins to search private items from ajax
- Added SSS_VERBOSE mode for additional debug logging when debug log enabled and define('SSS_VERBOSE', true); in wp-config.php
- Updated ajax search so that stock checks are ignored for admins
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
Get Super Speedy Search →
