Installation & Setup

Fetchie replaces WordPress’s built-in search with results that work the way people expect: the best match first, a highlighted snippet showing why it matched, and links that jump straight to the exact passage on the page. This page walks you from installation to your first real search — about thirty minutes, most of which is the index quietly building itself.

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Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or higher
• PHP 8.0 or higher

WooCommerce is optional. With it, Fetchie understands product variations (WooCommerce & Product Search); without it, everything else works exactly the same.

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Installation

1. Download the Fetchie ZIP from your Tracksies account
2. Go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin
3. Choose the ZIP file and click Install Now
4. Activate Fetchie

Fetchie appears as Fetchie under the Tracksies menu in your admin sidebar, with three tabs: Index, Insights, and Settings.

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Activating Your License

Your license unlocks automatic updates and support.

1. Go to Tracksies > Settings > Licenses
2. Find the Fetchie card
3. Enter your license key (it’s in your purchase email) and click Activate

The card’s badge flips to Active once the key is verified.

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Your First Thirty Minutes

1. Choose what gets searchable

Go to Tracksies > Fetchie — the Index tab opens first. Under What gets indexed you’ll see a toggle for each content type on your site, with a count of how many published items each one would add. This is worth a moment of thought before you build anything: posts and pages almost always belong in search; a content type used for internal structure usually doesn’t.

Some types carry a note that they have no public page. Those can still appear in results, but visitors may not be able to open them directly — usually a sign to leave them off.

When you’re happy, click Save selection.

2. Build the index

Click Rebuild index. Fetchie walks every published item in your selected types, reading each page the way a visitor would see it — so content built with a page builder is indexed just as well as classic posts. A progress bar keeps you company; on a typical site this takes a few minutes because Fetchie deliberately paces itself to be gentle on your server.

If the progress finishes with a warning about documents “running on thin content”, head to Troubleshooting — it’s almost always a maintenance-mode or security plugin getting between Fetchie and your pages, and the Test page fetch button on the same tab will tell you in one click.

3. Search your site — from a private window

Open a private (incognito) browser window and use your site’s normal search box, or visit yoursite.com/?s=something. You’ll see Fetchie’s ranked results with highlighted snippets.

Why the private window? Two reasons, both friendly ones. First, it shows you exactly what a visitor sees. Second, searches made by logged-in administrators are deliberately left out of the Insights data — so you can test all day without muddying your own statistics. If you search while logged in as an admin, the results work normally; the search just isn’t recorded. Nothing is broken, it’s on purpose.

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What Happens From Here

You don’t need to babysit the index:

• Publish or update something and it’s indexed within moments
• Unpublish or delete something and it leaves the index immediately
• A daily freshness pass re-checks a batch of the oldest entries, so gradual changes (a tweaked template, a builder redesign) work their way in on their own

The Indexing page explains all of this in detail, including the one honest rebuild-worthy situation: big sweeping changes you want searchable today.

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Where Everything Lives

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Next Steps

• How results work — ranking, snippets, and jump links
• Search settings — pick the right strictness for your site
• Insights — see what people search for, and what they can’t find
• Custom search templates — if you’ve built your own search page in a page builder