2025 ElasticPress Updates Deliver New & Improved WordPress Search Capabilities
Thorsten Ott on
ElasticPress, our speedy and intelligent website search solution that brings Elasticsearch to WordPress, continues to evolve to support new use cases and improve usability for site owners and developers. With the release of ElasticPress 5.2, and the companion ElasticPress Labs 2.4 update, we’ve added highly sought after enhancements that make our WordPress search solution even more versatile for professional site developers, including enhanced support for a popular WordPress field management plugin, location based searching, and improvements for headless applications of WordPress.
ElasticPress 5.2
ElasticPress 5.2 is now live, bringing major updates for power users.
ACF Repeater Fields
With over 2 million active installations, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for adding and managing structured content and data beyond the standard post and page fields. ElasticPress could already search the content of ACF fields, and with ElasticPress 5.2, you can now search ACF Repeater field content.
Because site owners don’t always want all of their website’s fields and data to influence search results, we offer granular control over which fields are searchable with a simple toggle right inside the ACF field management tools. Site managers can then use the intuitive ElasticPress Weighting dashboard – right inside WordPress – to fine tune the impact of these fields on their website’s search results.
Document Status Indicator
ElasticPress offers granular developer control over what content makes into the search index. Particularly among developers connecting third-party Elastic infrastructure with our open source plugin (instead of using our WordPress-optimized ElasticPress.io platform), the need to troubleshoot the search index can be common. With ElasticPress 5.2, it is easy to tell if content is in the search index thanks to a simple indicator in the WordPress admin menu bar.
As always, the latest release also includes a handful of under-the-hood improvements, including increased developer extensibility and improved compatibility with edge use cases. The full changelog can be found on Github.
ElasticPress Labs 2.4
ElasticPress Labs is a companion plugin that makes it easier for professional developers to tap into more powerful search capabilities available in the underlying Elasticsearch technology.
Geolocation Support
ElasticPress Labs 2.4 adds support for search based on location, unlocking use cases like stores and inventory finders or real estate searches. Thanks to out-of-the-box integration with the Google Maps API, addresses can also be instantly converted to the latitude and longitude coordinates Elasticsearch uses to calculate proximity.
Search Template Improvements
ElasticPress’s Search Templates can be a game-changer for developers using WordPress for decoupled projects, like a mobile app or a headless website. The feature, which builds on ElasticPress.io’s exclusive Search API, enables developers to store pre-defined search queries – “search templates” – and call them on demand. The search logic and code – like which post types to search, what fields to return, or the display order for results – all live in templates securely stored on ElasticPress.io, only awaiting the search terms. This eliminates the need to funnel search requests through WordPress (saving precious time and server resources) and avoids exposing sensitive keys or complex query code to the public.
ElasticPress Labs 2.4.0 increases the number of templates each site can store from 1 to 10. And now, developers building headless WordPress sites with the HeadstartWP framework have a ready-to-go React component to easily take advantage of this feature.
Ongoing Innovation & Progress
These updates are just the latest improvements following years of iterative improvement to our open source Elasticsearch connector and our hosted, WordPress-optimized Elasticsearch service.
Last year’s major 5.1 release added support for the latest Elasticsearch engine, the ability to search TXT and CSV files inside the WordPress media library, and introduced improvements to our search synonym feature and user interface. ElasticPress Labs 2.3 added support for external file searches – a feature built in partnership with Pew Research.
Our latest releases lay the foundation for upcoming AI-powered features, including natural language processing (NLP) for supercharged search.
Be sure to visit the ElasticPress website to learn more about our search solution, keep up with all of the latest updates, and sign up for an easy-to-set-up free ElasticPress.io trial.