Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
Get Super Speedy Search →Comparing Swiftype 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 Swiftype
Swiftype, now part of Elastic, is a hosted enterprise search platform that provides site search as a managed service. It offers a crawler-based indexing approach, custom result rankings, and analytics dashboards. It is aimed at larger organisations with dedicated budgets for search infrastructure and ongoing subscription costs.
How Super Speedy Search differs from Swiftype
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 Swiftype and Super Speedy Search?
Swiftype is a capable enterprise product, but its managed infrastructure model means your search data lives outside your own stack and costs accumulate with traffic. Super Speedy Search runs entirely within your WordPress installation, using a SQL-first architecture that keeps everything on your own server. It is benchmarked against one-million-product catalogues before every release and comes with a free trial so you can validate performance on your own staging environment without any financial commitment.
What do others say about Super Speedy Search?
Awesome support and a great product – I had trouble using the product and Dave went out of his way to help and to get it working for me. Highly recommended – great plugin for search. Thank you
Game changing plugin with fantastic and responsive support. Our operation is currently small in scope when compared to other sites powered by Super Speed Search, however, we now have the confidence that we can continue to grow our catalog without destroying Woo's performance.
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!
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 →
