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:
The fastest search for WordPress and WooCommerce, and the most relevant. Super Speedy Search returns results in as little as 0.2 seconds on a million-product store, with suggestions appearing instantly as your customers type and smart weighting that puts the right products first. It runs entirely on your own server, so there are no Algolia or hosted-search fees, and it speeds up every search in wp-admin too. Built for big catalogues, from a few thousand products up to 500,000+ posts.
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 →- Analytics & Caching: Track Searches and Cache Hot Results
- Faster wp-admin meta search
- Multi-search: Prioritise Recent Content for Faster Searches
- Searching multiple post types in full-page search results: Single ranked list vs Mixed sections
- Smart Variation Search
- Taxonomy combination suggestions
- Taxonomy Search
- 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
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?
5.55.1 (7th July 2026)
- Fixed a fatal error that could take down wp-admin on sites still running an older build. The main plugin file used to load helper files out of the plugin's test folder, including one required on every REST API init. When the test folder was moved to a hidden .tests directory during a refactor, that path no longer resolved and PHP threw an uncaught "Failed opening required '…/tests/test-frontend-search.php'" fatal during admin REST preloads (seen via WooCommerce/Jetpack). The main plugin file now loads no test code at all – the .tests harness bootstraps itself – so this whole class of error cannot recur.
5.55 (15th June 2026)
- Added meta key axis option to taxonomy suggestions so you can mix and match meta values and term names in the suggestions builder
- Updated the Super Speedy Settings page: added a "Recheck Licenses" button above the licence table so customers have a clear way to refresh licence status after a renewal or upgrade without scrolling down to the licence-key field. The button is disabled until a licence key is entered/saved and re-enables as you type.
- The Recheck flow now also force-bypasses the auth-server's own 1-hour licence cache (via a `force=1` flag on the `wpiapi/check_product_key` call), so renewals/upgrades that completed less than an hour before a recheck no longer show as expired/exceeded. Normal admin page loads continue to use both caches as before — only an explicit Recheck click bypasses them. (Lives in the `super-speedy-settings` submodule, so the change propagates to every Super Speedy plugin.)
5.54 (11th June 2026)
- Fixed error with mysqli error (`mysqli_get_server_info(): Argument #1 ($mysql) must be of type mysqli, null given`) that could appear in the PHP error log during the WordPress `shutdown` hook, typically attributed to WooCommerce Action Scheduler. The suggestions/autocomplete handler `sss_get_json_Suggestions()` was calling `$wpdb->close()`, which closed the shared global database connection mid-request. WordPress does not reconnect within the same request, so the next code to use the database on shutdown — usually WooCommerce's BatchProcessingController calling Action Scheduler — crashed on the now-null connection handle. The redundant `$wpdb->close()` call has been removed; PHP closes the connection automatically at the end of the request anyway.
Want faster results? Try Super Speedy Search on your store.
Get Super Speedy Search →