How We Stopped Fighting Search and Started Living (With Meilisearch)

Over the last couple of years I’ve spent way too much time trying and removing different search solutions for MainWP’s websites. Years. For search.

We run multiple properties: the MainWP website, a discourse community forum, blog, knowledgebase, API specific docs and the MainWP Developer website. Each one critical for our users. Each one generating support tickets when people couldn’t find what they needed. And somehow, in 2025, making search actually work across all of them, at a price that made sense, was harder than building the sites themselves.

The Journey Through Search Hell

WordPress Native Search: The Starting Point

We started where everyone starts. Native WordPress search.

You already know how this goes. Type “backup” and get results from 2019 about backing up your car. Type “MainWP dashboard” and get a post about car dashboards someone mentioned once in a comment. It’s pattern matching at its worst, with zero understanding of context or relevance. x The real problem? WordPress search treats every word like it exists in a vacuum. No synonyms. No typo tolerance. No understanding that “site” and “sites” might be related. Your users better type exactly what you wrote, or they’re out of luck.

Jetpack Search: Solid Product, Wrong Use Case

Next stop: Jetpack Search.

At $8.33/month (billed yearly), Jetpack Search is reasonably priced. You get instant search, powerful filtering, spelling correction, and support for 38 languages. For a single WordPress site, it’s a solid solution.

Problem is, Jetpack Search only works within a single WordPress installation. We needed something that could search across our MainWP site, forum, blog, and knowledge base. All separate WordPress installations on different domains. Jetpack Search treats each site as its own island.

For a single site or WordPress multisite network? Jetpack Search is solid. We actually recommend it to MainWP users who need better search on their individual sites. But for searching across multiple separate WordPress properties? That’s not what it was built for.

SearchWP: So Close, Yet So Limited

SearchWP showed real promise. $199/year for Pro (3 sites), unlimited searches, no usage meters.

The plugin itself is solid. Custom weights, synonym support, PDF indexing. But SearchWP lives inside WordPress. It can’t reach across to other installations. We have more than 3 sites anyway, so we’d need the $399/year Agency plan. Even then, it still wouldn’t solve the cross-domain search problem.

Algolia: The Enterprise Maze

Then came Algolia.

Their pricing page should have been the first warning. Free tier up to 10K searches, then “pay as you go” at $0.50 per 1,000 searches. Sounds reasonable until you dig deeper.

The Grow plan? Keyword search only. No AI features. No semantic search. The actual features that make Algolia worth using? That’s the Premium or Elevate plans. Both require annual contracts. Both require “contact sales” for pricing.

I hate sales pages like that so I did NOT contact them.

Enter Meilisearch

Meilisearch approached search differently. Instead of complex pricing tiers and feature gates, they just… told us the price.

$30/month for their Build plan. That’s it. No calculators. No sales calls. No “contact us for enterprise pricing.”

But here’s what really matters: that $30 includes everything. AI features, semantic search, typo tolerance, all of it. Not locked behind enterprise tiers. Not “coming soon.” Available now, in the cheapest plan.

The Setup That Actually Worked

After wrestling with SearchWP and getting lost in Algolia’s documentation, we decided to try Meilisearch.

First, we grabbed a trial and tested it on a single index. Looked promising. But we needed multi-index search, and that’s where things got interesting.

The challenge: Meilisearch provides an embed script, but it only supports single index search. Each index needs its own embed script. For our use case (searching across multiple properties), that wouldn’t work.

Enter Bogdan Rapaic, the team member who actually made this happen. He got a proof of concept running for multi-index search, then indexed all our content and configured the search algorithms.

Instead of building something from scratch using their API, Bogdan took their existing JS script and modified it to search through multiple indices. Smart move. Faster than starting from zero.

He packed it as a custom WordPress plugin for mainwp.com and mainwp.dev. For our community site (which isn’t WordPress), he loaded the JS from mainwp.com and created a custom trigger. Some styling updates, final testing, and we were live.

Was it completely plug-and-play? No. But compared to the alternatives, it was straightforward enough that one team member could handle it without pulling their hair out.

The Features That Actually Matter

Here’s what actually changed:

Typo tolerance that works: User types “instalation”? They get “installation” results. No configuration needed. It just knows.

Instant everything: Search results appear as users type. Not “fast for WordPress.” Actually instant. Sub-50ms response times that make users think something’s broken because they’re not used to speed.

Cross-site intelligence: Search our docs, get relevant forum discussions. Search our blog, see related knowledge base articles. Everything connects without complex configuration.

Real analytics: Not just “top searches” but “searches with no results,” “common typos,” “search paths.” The stuff that actually helps you improve your content.

Actual AI features: Not locked behind enterprise tiers. Semantic search understands “how to add client sites” matches “adding new sites to dashboard.” Built-in, no extra cost.

What Nobody Tells You About Search Costs

Everyone focuses on the monthly fee. $30/month for Meilisearch, they say. That’s $360/year!

Let’s talk about the real costs:

Developer time focused on custom features: Bogdan spent his time building multi-index functionality instead of managing infrastructure. That custom work is what made it actually useful for our needs.

Support time savings: When users can find what they need, they don’t need to ask support.

User retention: Users who can’t find documentation don’t become customers. If bad search costs you even two customers per month at $199/year each, that’s $398/month in lost revenue.

Suddenly $30/month looks like the bargain of the century.

The Real Pricing Comparison

Let me break down what we actually found:

SearchWP: $199/year for Pro (3 sites), $399/year for Agency (unlimited sites). Great if you’re in the WordPress ecosystem only. Won’t work across separate installations.

Algolia: Their pricing page is intentionally confusing. Free tier, then pay-as-you-go, but the good features (AI, NeuralSearch) are locked behind Premium and Elevate plans that require “contact sales.” No published prices for what you actually need.

Meilisearch: $30/month for their Build plan. Everything included. No enterprise upsell. No feature gates.

Should You Make the Same Choice?

If you’re running a simple WordPress blog, probably not. SearchWP at $199/year will serve you better. One site, one search, one solution.

But if you’re in our situation: multiple properties, thousands of pages, users who depend on finding information quickly, then yeah, look hard at Meilisearch Cloud.

Try It Out

We’ve just launched Meilisearch across all MainWP properties. It actually works across all our sites. The pricing is transparent ($30/month flat). One team member could implement it without losing his mind.

Is it perfect? No. We had to build our own intergration for multi-index search and we would love to know if you see any issues during your searches, let me know over on our Discord Server.

But it works. Go ahead, try searching for something on any of our sites. Type it wrong. Search for “instalation” or “extention” or whatever typo you usually make. Watch it actually find what you’re looking for.

The search box is right there at the top of every page. Give it a shot. Let us know what you think.

For MainWP, getting our users to the right information faster is worth every penny of that $30/month.

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P.S. The search journey scorecard: Native WordPress (free but useless) → Jetpack ($8.33/month, single site only) → SearchWP ($199/year Pro, WordPress-only) → Algolia (confusing pricing, AI features need enterprise plan) → Meilisearch Cloud ($30/month, everything included). Sometimes paying a bit more for something that actually solves your problem is the smart move.