ElasticPress vs 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• Added a Cancel Superseded Searches setting beside Fast Ajax, off by default: while a shopper types, each keystroke's dropdown search stops the previous keystroke's database query for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%%.