Tips & Best Practices

The web crawler does comprehensive indexing — it reads your entire site from the sitemap, extracts structured data from HTML and JSON-LD. Data ingestion pushes updates in real-time when you save or delete posts. Use both: crawler for the baseline, ingestion for instant updates.

Run the crawler first to get all your content indexed. Once the initial crawl is done, enable ingestion with real-time sync — every post save/delete will instantly update your search index without waiting for the next crawl.

Schedule a weekly crawl from the Data Crawler tab and set a "Keep Fresh Days" value. The crawler will automatically re-index pages that haven't been updated recently, keeping your search results current even if you forget to re-crawl manually.

Map your product categories, tags, and post types as facets. Faceted navigation lets visitors filter results by category, price range, content type, and custom fields — dramatically improving the search experience for sites with lots of content.

The Analytics dashboard shows what visitors searched for but couldn't find. Check the No-Results table weekly — every entry is a content gap. Create pages for the top ones, add synonyms in your Solr config, or use elevation to pin relevant existing pages.

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

For WooCommerce products, the short description becomes the search result snippet. Products without short descriptions will show a generic or empty snippet. Well-written short descriptions also improve SEO and search relevance.

WordPress's built-in pseudo-cron doesn't work for bulk ingestion. Set DISABLE_WP_CRON=true in wp-config.php and add a system cron job. If running as root, include --allow-root — wp-cli silently refuses to run as root without it.

The plugin communicates with the Opensolr API over HTTPS. Make sure your SSL certificate is valid and auto-renewing. If it expires, the crawler can't access your pages and API calls will fail.

AI Hints, AI Reader, and hybrid vector search are available on vector-enabled plans tailored to your needs. Contact support@opensolr.com to set up a plan. Lexical keyword search works on every plan out of the box.