Swiftype vs Super Speedy Search
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:
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 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?
After using 2 other plugins from Super Speedy Plugins, our choice for a new search plugin easily fell to Super Speedy Search: fast and immediate support and of course amazing speed! I also use Scalability Pro and Infinite Scroll, so when our previous search plugin provider raised prices 50-fold, we needed a new search plugin. Knowing that this existed, it was a quick and painless switch to Super Speedy Search as it would also improve back-end search, something we were struggling with as with about 35.000 products it wasn't always as fast as we wanted it
That is the best search plugin on the market and I can guarantee that – I have tried pretty much everything. I have a website with over 500k posts and I got to the point that I was thinking of removing my search bar. SSS is the way to go! Ordering and giving weights to search is easy, AJAX speeds are incredible. Thank you for making this plugin!
Dave managed to achieve a full integration with my Woodmart e-commerce theme. On a store with thousands of products, product search is crucial, and speed is a precious asset. Previously, with Woodmart’s AJAX search, results took on average 2 to 3 seconds to load — now, thanks to Dave’s work, the search is instant. I highly recommend Speedy Search and thank David for what he has done!
Super Speedy Search Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →- Can I update Search without rebuilding the search index?
- Why did Jetpack (or another scanner) flag sss.php?
- Analytics & Caching: Track Searches and Cache Hot Results
- Boolean-only relevance scoring
- Cancel Superseded Searches
- Faster wp-admin meta search
- Multi-search: Prioritise Recent Content for Faster Searches
- Restricting a search box to one category
- Searching multiple post types in full-page search results: Single ranked list vs Mixed sections
- Skipping searches made only of short words
- 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
- MariaDB "DOUBLE value is out of range" after a rebuild
- Meta Search – Super Speedy Search Settings
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?
5.95.0 (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%%.
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
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