How to improve your website’s user experience with better search functionality
September 10, 2025
For many users, your website’s search bar is the fastest way to find what they need. Instead of clicking through endless menus or pages or having to think too hard, they rely on search to get straight to the product, service, or information they’re looking for. That makes your search one of the most important parts of a website’s navigation. If it’s not working well, your visitors will notice.
To improve your website’s search, we may recommend upgrading to Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch is an open-source platform used by many large companies that gives your website developers the right tools to make your search work better.
Standard Website Search
Before we can get into the benefits of Elasticsearch, it’s important to mention why it is sometimes needed. Most website’s standard searching method is done through matching exact terms in the database. Depending on the size of your database and what you are searching through this can often be slow and inaccurate.
Search Speed
One of the main reasons we recommend Elasticsearch is the speed in which it can return search results. Often times, Elasticsearch can analyze millions of data records in under 100 milliseconds. Of course, this all depends on the setup, the data, and how you are using Elasticsearch, but this speed will be infinitely faster than most default search engines built into a website. This means users can get results faster.
Search Relevancy
A major advantage to Elasticsearch is the website developer has full control over how we determine relevancy of results. Elasticsearch comes preset with many tools that can be used to improve the search result relevancy. This includes fuzzy matching (handling typos and variations of words), properly analyzing the use of plurals, contextual searching, synonym matching, and weighted scoring.
With these tools your website developer can determine how to return the most relevant results for your users based on search terms they are likely to use.
Document Searching
Elasticsearch can also analyze your PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and text-based documents and incorporate them into your search results. If your site has a lot of documents, this makes it easier for your users to quickly find them.
This functionality is not just limited to the user’s search; it could also be used to link data automatically. For example, we use this functionality to match product SKUs with the manufacturers PDF documents for one client’s project. This saves our client from manually having to link these documents to each product. If your site has 10 products this might not be worth doing, but for a site with tens of thousands of SKUs, it is.
Autocomplete Suggestions
Elasticsearch can autocomplete the users search query as they type. This gives the user some search suggestions that can lead to an improved user experience and help the user find what they are looking for faster.
Search Optimization
Search is a major component to a lot of websites and optimization is important so that users can find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. By reviewing your Elasticsearch analytics, your web developer can analyze what your users are searching for and continuously work to improve the results returned.
Interested in Improving Your Website’s Search?
We have a lot of experience improving website search systems and working with ElasticSearch. Our web design team is here to help you improve your website’s search.