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Last Reviewed: 2026-02-10

Setup and Configure ElasticPress

Instructions for setting up and configuring the ElasticPress plugin on your Pantheon WordPress site.

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Beta support for Elasticsearch

This documentation describes support for Elasticsearch that is under active development and is available to customers who are participating in our Beta program.

Getting Elasticsearch running on your Pantheon WordPress site involves activating the service on the platform and then installing and configuring the ElasticPress plugin within WordPress.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, confirm the following:

  • Your site is on a Performance or Elite plan.
  • You are running a WordPress site. Elasticsearch is not available for Drupal sites at this time.
  • You have administrator access to both the Pantheon Dashboard and your WordPress admin.

Step 1: Activate Elasticsearch on Pantheon

You can activate Elasticsearch through the Pantheon Dashboard or via Terminus.

Note

During the Beta phase, activating Elasticsearch may take up to 12 minutes to complete.

Step 2: Install the ElasticPress Plugin

Install the ElasticPress plugin from the WordPress.org plugin repository. You can install it from your WordPress admin dashboard or via WP-CLI:

Step 3: Activate ElasticPress in WordPress

  1. In your WordPress admin, navigate to ElasticPress > Settings.
  2. Verify that the host connection is established. If the constants are configured correctly, the ElasticPress.io Host URL, Subscription ID and Subscription Token fields should be pre-populated.
  3. Run your first index sync from the ElasticPress dashboard. This sends your WordPress content to Elasticsearch so it can be searched.

Step 4: Enable ElasticPress Features

ElasticPress offers several features you can enable based on your needs:

  • Search: Enhanced search with fuzzy matching, so visitors find results even with typos.
  • Instant Results: A search experience that bypasses WordPress and routes queries through a dedicated API, delivering results significantly faster than standard WordPress search.
  • Autosuggest: Displays real-time search suggestions in a dropdown as visitors type in the search field.
  • Filters: Adds controls to the Instant Results page to filter content by one or more taxonomies such as categories, tags, and custom taxonomies. Provides blocks for filtering by taxonomy, post type, date, and metadata.
  • Related Posts: Delivers relevant content recommendations based on post context, with no impact on site performance.
  • WooCommerce: Improved product search and filtering for WooCommerce stores.
  • Documents: Indexes text inside popular file types (PDFs, Word documents, and more) and includes them in search results.

Additionally, the ElasticPress service provides admin-level capabilities including Synonyms (connecting different terms to the same content), Weighted Results (prioritizing specific fields like titles or categories), and Custom Results (shaping rankings for specific queries) — these are managed through the ElasticPress settings rather than the Features screen.

Navigate to ElasticPress > Features in your WordPress admin to enable and configure each feature.