Note: This post refers to Drupal 8, but is very applicable to Drupal 7 sites as well

Most Drupal developers are experienced building sitewide search with Search API and Views. But it’s easy to learn and harder to master. These are the most common mistakes I see made when doing this task:

Not reviewing Analytics

Before you start, make sure you have access to analytics if relevant. You want to get an idea of how much sitewide search is being used and what the top searches are. On many sites, sitewide search usage is extremely low and you may need to explain this statistic to stakeholders asking for any time-consuming search features (and yourself before you start going down rabbit holes of refinements).

Take a look for yourself at how the sitewide search is currently performing for the top keywords users are giving it. Do the relevant pages come up first? You’ll take this into account when configuring boosts.

Using Solr for small sites

Drupal 8 Search API comes with database search included. Search API DB has come a long way over the years and is likely to have the features you need for smaller sites. Using a Solr backend is going to add complexity that may not be worth it for the amount of value your sitewide search is giving. Remember, if you use a Solr backend you have to have Solr running on all environments used in the project and you’ll have to reindex when you sync databases.

Not configuring all environments for working Solr

Which takes us to this one. If you do use Solr (or another server-side index) you need to also make sure your team has Solr running on their local environments and has an index for the site. 

Your settings.php needs to be configured to connect to the right index on each environment. We use Probo for review sandboxes so we need to configure our Probo builds to use the right search index and to index it on build.

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