WP Engine brings AI innovation to WordPress websites with Elastic and Google Cloud

WP Engine is the number-one platform for WordPress, hosting more than 200,000 websites for more than 1.5 million users across 150+ countries. Since launching in 2010, the organization has developed dozens of cutting-edge features that help its clients convert website visitors to customers. Now the company is helping these organizations harness the power of artificial intelligence, including advanced search and AI-powered recommendations, to boost sales.

Luke Patterson, Senior Product Manager at WP Engine, says, "Businesses need the latest AI tools for their websites, but innovation needs to be matched with a secure, stable online environment that can scale fast when demand spikes. These are the criteria we use when selecting our technology partners."

For this reason, WP Engine has put Elasticsearch, built on Elastic's Search AI Platform and Google Cloud, at the heart of its technology stack. Instead of having to engage with several vendors, WP Engine can develop and deliver the majority of its website tools and WordPress plugins with best-in-class technology from just two partners. This streamlined approach simplifies development, boosts performance, and enhances integration across its offerings.

Patterson calls out two major challenges that Elastic overcomes. First, WordPress data exists in countless configurations. "With Elastic we can extract any data type from WordPress, normalize it, map it to various fields, and then host it in the Elastic vector database."

The second challenge is search relevance. "Elastic is simply the best solution for search and search hosting," says Patterson. "It means we can offer a cutting-edge search experience that is genuinely useful for an extremely wide variety of customers and types of websites."

Best of all, Elasticsearch is more closely integrated with Google Cloud than ever before. For instance, the Elasticsearch vector database is now integrated with Vertex AI as a natively supported information retrieval engine, enabling Elastic users to combine the multimodal strengths of Google's Gemini models with AI-powered semantic and hybrid search capabilities in Elasticsearch.

This simplifies the development of generative AI applications based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG). In essence, WP Engine customers have all the critical tools required to build generative AI applications, including creating virtual assistants or chatbots grounded in actual business data, or providing context-aware content recommendations that suggest the right product based on what the user is doing.

Shane Daly, principal software engineer at WP Engine, says, "Elasticsearch integration with Google's AI tools means you don't have to build complicated connections from scratch. You can focus on creating great user experiences, not wiring systems together."

With Elasticsearch and Google Cloud, WP Engine can continue to add features that enable customers to monetize website traffic. "Most of our clients invest in marketing or advertising with the goal of driving traffic to their site," says Patterson. "Our primary objective is to help them retain, engage, and convert these visitors."

Patterson gives the example of Smart Search AI, a WP Engine feature that delivers fast, accurate results using natural language and semantic search. This directly contributes to increased engagement and helps convert "high-intent visitors" by immediately providing them with the information or products they are seeking.

Speed also matters. Fast website response times are critical for retaining users and reducing bounce rates. With Elasticsearch, WP Engine can offer customers near-instant updates to pages and product listings. Elastic's backend performance, with response times around five milliseconds, delivers a seamless, real-time experience for website visitors.

Elastic also delivers when it comes to scalability. Daly gives the example of a large media customer using WP Engine's search API in a way that resulted in search traffic on the production server ballooning from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions within minutes. "There was zero downtime, not a single hiccup. The Elastic Cloud infrastructure scaled up exactly as we had hoped."

There's a fascinating postscript to this episode. The media customer was using the API to power a recommendation engine integrated with a non-Google LLM. Now, thanks to the close integration between Elastic, Vertex AI, and Gemini, WP Engine can offer the very same functionality, saving the customer significant development time and infrastructure costs by eliminating the need to build and maintain a custom solution.

One of the standout aspects of working with Elastic, according to Patterson, is the company's ability to anticipate customer needs. As WP Engine continues to evolve its search and recommendation capabilities, it frequently discovers critical features it needs only to find that Elastic had already released them months earlier.

"Elastic's forward-thinking approach helps prevent technical roadblocks and accelerates development," says Patterson. "Whatever the future holds for our business, our customers, and the web at large, we know that Elastic, with its close ties to Google Cloud, has our back."