ffinder – Search & Analytics

ffinder replaces the slow default WordPress search with a dedicated, indexed FULLTEXT engine, and gives you an analytics dashboard so you finally know what your visitors are looking for — and whether they find it.

It is built for speed (a denormalized search index keeps queries off the main wp_posts tables, and repeated searches are served from cache) and for insight (every search, click and “no results” query is recorded and visualised).

Everything described below is included and fully functional. There is no trial, no usage limit and no feature that stops working after a while.

Search experience

• Indexed FULLTEXT search with weighted title / excerpt / content fields.
• Live autocomplete for posts, categories and tags, with configurable limits.
• “Did you mean?” suggestions for queries that return no results.
• Term highlighting in the results.
• Floating global search tab available site-wide, with an optional keyboard shortcut.
• Gutenberg “Search Button” block, the [ffinder_search] shortcode, a classic widget and a nav-menu item.
• Optional replacement of the theme’s native search form.

Search analytics dashboard

• KPIs: total searches, unique queries, success rate, average results.
• Interactive activity charts over configurable time ranges.
• Top queries, top clicked results and queries without results (content gaps).
• Click tracking on results.
• One-click CSV export of the analytics table.

Performance & maintenance tools

• Denormalized search index with an incremental daily refresh.
• Cached responses for repeated queries.
• Index health diagnostics and a batched “Rebuild index” tool.
• Settings export / import.

Privacy

ffinder does not contact any external service. No data leaves your site: searches, clicks and analytics are stored only in your own WordPress database, and all bundled assets (Font Awesome, Chart.js) are served locally rather than from a CDN.

Search records are stored in ffinder’s own tables and include the visitor’s IP address and user agent, which is what makes bot filtering and rate limiting possible. You can delete this history at any time from ffinder → Analytics, and enabling “Delete all data on uninstall” in the settings removes every ffinder table and option when the plugin is deleted.

A note on ffinder Pro

A separate paid add-on adds product search — from WooCommerce or from an external feed, with a Products tab in the results and products in autocomplete — plus GA4 revenue attribution, advanced analytics (conversion funnel, activity heatmap, content-opportunity drill-downs), trending searches, voice search, featured products and search-quality regression testing. It is an independent plugin: nothing in this plugin depends on it, is disabled without it, or checks for a licence.