Integrating Algolia for search on my site
I’ve been writing #DailyNotes for 90 days now. Before that, I had already written about ten articles on the blog. So the content is starting to be quite voluminous.
It often happens that when writing a note, I refer to another one I had written before. So I had to look for it, and find it.
WordPress’ native search system is very great. It’s accurate, efficient, and I’ve almost always used it as a search system on the sites I build. But in this case, it was getting a bit complicated.
So I had to find a tool or an integration that would allow me to search more or less asynchronously.
I already knew Algolia because I saw it used on several sites, and I did some research on it. Same for ElasticSearch.
But I finally opted for Algolia because of its ease of integration, the interface which is rather simple and intuitive. Also I had the possibility to customize a lot the interface of the search results. And moreover, I had autocompletion during searches.
This is exactly what I was looking for. So I used the plugin « WP Search with Algolia » by WebDevStudios that integrated Algolia to WordPress since the team had stopped supporting integration to the CMS.
It was a rather difficult choice to opt for a plugin, because I try to avoid as much as possible what could affect the performance of my site. But the folks at WebDevStudios did a good job with their plugin. And I would have included the same number of JavaScript files if I had opted for manual integration myself.
That’s the story behind the integration of Algolia into my site’s search system.
