Tips & Best Practices

Search for your most important terms (your brand name, "pricing", "contact") and pin the right results to the top. This takes 10 seconds and guarantees visitors find what they need.

The Analytics dashboard shows what visitors searched for but couldn't find. These are content gaps — create pages for the top no-results queries to improve user experience.

Don't enable every facet you can. Start with 2-3 that make sense (like Category and Content Type) and add more based on what visitors actually filter by. Too many facets overwhelm users.

If you have taxonomy terms, categories, or product attributes, map them as facets. The more structured data the crawler has, the better your search filters work.

AI Hints shine when you have lots of detailed content — documentation, knowledge bases, tutorials, product descriptions. They give visitors instant answers from your own content.

The crawler requires HTTPS. Make sure your SSL certificate is valid and auto-renewing. If it expires, the crawler can't access your pages and your index becomes stale.

The crawler uses your page titles and meta descriptions for search results. Well-written titles and descriptions lead to better search results and higher click-through rates.

Changed your field mappings? Restructured your content types? Switched themes? Hit "Force Re-crawl All" in the Go Live section to re-index everything with the latest changes.

The default search tuning settings work well for most sites. Only adjust field weights or minimum match if you're seeing specific problems. The "Balanced" minimum match preset is recommended for most use cases.

Every Twig template can be overridden from your Drupal theme. Copy templates from the module's templates/ folder to your theme's templates/ folder. The main ones: opensolr-search-page.html.twig (search page), opensolr-autocomplete-item.html.twig (autocomplete), opensolr-analytics-dashboard.html.twig (analytics).

If your site has downloadable PDFs, Word docs, or spreadsheets, enable "Include attached files". The crawler extracts text from these documents and makes them searchable alongside your web pages.

Persistent filters are great for hiding content that shouldn't appear in search (admin pages, test content, internal URLs). But be careful with Include filters — they restrict ALL searches.