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Pagefind is a library for performant, low-bandwidth, fully static search.
Last release 5 months ago
12 Apr 2026
Release timing varies
gaps range from 8 days to 7 months
Nearly every release is documented
notes for 5 of 5 stable releases
Nothing withdrawn
no release was ever pulled
2 years old
14 releases · first in 2024
One column per month.
Cleaned up a wasm-bindgen deprecation warning popping up in the browser console.
v1.5.0 was meant to 2x indexing performance, which it does on macOS and Windows. On Linux, with the published musl build, it actually halves the indexing performance. This release subs in jemalloc on Linux musl builds to fix the musl allocator thrashing, and performance now achieves the 2x v1.4.0 claim.Hey! This is a big one. Pagefind 1.5.0 has been fermenting for a while, and addresses a lot of long-standing issues and feature requests. This release
Hey! This is a big one. Pagefind 1.5.0 has been fermenting for a while, and addresses a lot of long-standing issues and feature requests. This release brings an entirely new search UI built on web components, major improvements to search relevance and ranking, diacritics support, automatic CJK segmentation, Web Worker search, notably smaller indexes, and a much faster indexing binary. Enormous thanks to everyone who contributed features and fixes, as well as to everyone who tested the beta releases and provided feedback ❤️ - @bglw
If you only read this far, I should mention up front: The existing Default UI and Modular UI remain available and supported for now, so you can upgrade your sites to Pagefind v1.5.0 without migrating to the Component UI.
Pagefind ships a brand new UI system built entirely on web components. The Component UI gives you searchboxes, modals, result lists, and filter controls as composable <pagefind-*> elements that you can mix, match, and style with CSS variables.
The Component UI is available as vendored files in your /pagefind/ output directory, or as an npm package to install and import.
The best way to get a feel for the new components is on the 📘 Pagefind Component UI page of the docs, where interactive examples of various components are shown.
Extra goodies with the Component UI:
Pagefind now searches metadata by default! Importantly, this means it now searches the title metadata. Matches in titles are now taken into account, and search results are very hard to shake from prime positions if all (or much) of the title matches the search query.
You can configure the weight of any metadata field. See 📘 Configuring Metadata Weights to change the title boost or apply custom weights to your own metadata fields.
Beyond metadata searching, a bunch of weird and wonderful ranking bugs were resolved:
We finally properly support matching across diacritics. You can now find your cafés without remembering how to type é.
By default, exact diacritic matches are preferred. So if you're searching "cafe", pages with "cafe" will rank higher than pages with "café". Getting this relevance right by default was the final piece of the puzzle for shipping this, which is why it took a while to land. See 📘 Configuring Diacritic Similarity to adjust how this plays out on your site.
If you need strict matching, set exactDiacritics: true to disable normalization entirely — "cafe" will only match "cafe", and "café" will only match "café". 📘 Exact Diacritics
Thanks browsers! Pagefind now taps into Intl.Segmenter to chop search queries in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) non-whitespace-delimited languages. This was already done during indexing by Pagefind, but users searching still had to delimit their queries. Now searching "这是一段简单的测试文本" searches for the words "这", "是", "一段", "简单", "的", "测试", and "文本", which is also how that sentence was indexed.
We also updated the underlying stemming library (thanks @uded !) which brings stemming support for Polish and Estonian (and Esperanto, if anyone is out there indexing some lang="eo" pages). The Snowball upgrade also improves stemming quality across many already-supported languages.
The indexing binary (the one you install through npx or your wrapper of choice) is now both smaller (so, faster to download) and faster to run, by quite a lot on both fronts. On some sites, indexing is more than twice as fast. Thanks to @zmre for much of this!
Pagefind's search now runs in a Web Worker automatically. This doesn't make the search faster, per se, but it dramatically improves perceived performance on large websites by keeping the main thread responsive. If Web Workers are unavailable, it falls back to the main thread automatically.
Plus: Some low-hanging fruit was picked off, and Pagefind's index chunks are now ~45% smaller thanks to delta-encoding page numbers and word locations.
metaCacheTag — Allows you to configure the cache-busting tag on the metadata file (which is fetched fresh on every page load). For offline/PWA scenarios where assets need to be served with service workers, this can now be overridden.plain_excerpt — Search results and sub-results now include a plain_excerpt field containing the excerpt text without highlight mark tags, for those who want to handle highlighting themselves (or don't want it at all).matchedMetaFields — Search results now include a matchedMetaFields field listing which metadata fields matched the search query.includeCharacters is now available in the Node and Python wrapper APIs../image.png) breaking when displayed in search results. (PR #1087)arm64. (PR #950 — thanks @lioman !)pagefind PyPI package. (PR #991)aarch64-pc-windows-msvc) as a supported platform. (PR #1079)actix-web and related serving dependencies behind a serve feature flag (PR #1023)The Component UI is the new recommended way to add search to your site, and future UI work will focus there. The Default UI and Modular UI are sticking around for now, but the Component UI is where new features will land first.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this release!
Core refactor to speed up indexing
Changes since v1.5.0-beta.1:
v1.5.0 will follow in a few days.
Hey! This is a big one, so I thought we'd give a beta release a try. This release addresses a lot of long-standing issues and feature requests, alongs
Hey! This is a big one, so I thought we'd give a beta release a try. This release addresses a lot of long-standing issues and feature requests, alongside delivering an entirely new search UI.
This is the main reason for a beta release here. Writing a new ground-up UI system for Pagefind has been a big job, and I would love to get some more eyes on it before we send it out into the world on its stable release.
It's so large, in fact, that it has its own documentation site! If you're itching to see what it looks like, check out https://ui.pagefind.app/ for modals and searchboxes and custom web components and more!
The Component UI is available as vendored files in your /pagefind/ output directory, or it's available as an npm package to install and import.
One big request, for anybody reading this who has or wants to contribute translations, is to go look over the files changed in PR 1005. As part of this new UI, we have a new set of translation strings. Thankfully these could mostly be inferred from existing ones, but overall they need reviews from fluent speakers. ❤️
Pagefind now searches metadata! Yes, all metadata. By default. Importantly, this means it now searches the title metadata. Matches in titles are now taken into account, and search results are very hard to shake from prime positions if all (or much) of the title matches the search query.
This is also something you can configure! See 📘 Configuring Metadata Weights for how to change this title boost, or apply it to any and all metadata fields of your choosing.
Alongside that, a bunch of weird and wonderful ranking bugs were resolved. I'll write more in the final release notes, but PR 1003 goes into great detail on the various improvements that make searches better across the board. Plus PR 996 covers some of the chunk loading bugs that could also cause corner cases with searches.
We finally properly support matching across diacritics. You can now find your cafés without remembering how to type é!
This is, yet again, something you can configure. By default, exact diacritic matches are preferred. So if you're searching "cafe", pages with "cafe" will rank higher than pages with "café". Getting this relevance right by default was the final piece of the puzzle for shipping this, which is why it took a while to land. See 📘 Configuring Diacritic Similarity to adjust how this plays out on your site.
Thanks browsers! Pagefind now taps into Intl.Segmenter to chop search queries in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) non-whitespace-delimited languages. This was already done during indexing by Pagefind, but users searching still had to delimit their queries. Now searching "这是一段简单的测试文本" searches for the words "这", "是", "一段", "简单", "的", "测试", and "文本", which is also how that sentence was indexed.
Pagefind's search now runs in a Web Worker automatically. This doesn't make the search faster, per se, but it dramatically improves perceived performance on large websites by keeping the main thread responsive.
If Web Workers are unavailable, it falls back to the main thread automatically.
Some low-hanging fruit was picked off, and Pagefind's index chunks are now ~45% smaller. The indexing binary (the one you install through npx or your wrapper of choice) is now both smaller (so, faster to download) and faster to run, at least on my macOS machine.
Most of these things are pretty solid, and the new Component UI is the most in flux. I don't expect it to change much, but be aware nonetheless that some things might change before it stabilises in 1.5.0.
I would love your feedback! Please jump into the GitHub discussion for this release and highlight any issues. This will simmer happily, depending on feedback, for a week or three, so there's room for changes.
If you haven't used a beta release before, simply:
# if you run via npx, sub out `pagefind` for `pagefind@beta`
npx pagefind@beta
# or, if you have it as a dependency:
npm i pagefind@beta
# or, if you use the python distribution:
pip install --pre pagefind
# or, via cargo:
cargo install pagefind --version 1.5.0-beta1Or download the correct binary from this GitHub Release page.
Hope to hear from you!
Point beta and rc releases at the main repo/releases
Point beta and rc releases at the main repo/releases (#1007)
Exclude vendor dir from main pagefind pypi package
Exclude vendor dir from main pagefind pypi package (#991)
Nothing published for this version
Added the "Include Characters" option to allow indexing of specific special characters.
justfile, and improved CONTRIBUTING.md (hint hint)👋 from @bglw — I thought I'd add a new section to these release notes talking about what's next.
The biggest item on my list is to improve the relevance of the Pagefind search results. With the current setup, you can tweak enough settings to get decent results for a given site, but it needs to better meet the goal of working more-than-good-enough out of the box.
The second-biggest item is to fill out the Modular UI and transition the default Pagefind experience to use that. This has been pending for a long time, and will be a much better base for those who wish to customize their search more than the Default UI currently allows.
Releases also now trigger a GitHub Discussion to be created, so please drop any general thoughts, comments, or feedback there 🙂
Nothing published for this version
Nothing published for this version
Nothing published for this version
Added --quiet and --silent flags when running the Pagefind CLI, which reduce the logging output to only warnings or only errors respectively.
--quiet and --silent flags when running the Pagefind CLI, which reduce the logging output to only warnings or only errors respectively.data-pagefind-ui-meta attribute to the metadata tags on search results in the Default UI, allowing them to be targeted with CSS.
Date: April 19, 2024 will now have data-pagefind-ui-meta="date".data-pagefind-meta="phrase:this < that would index the literal < rather than a < character.data-pagefind-meta to capture the content of an element.Cannon in CloudCannon may have ranked the word incorrectly.Added Python bindings for indexing sites with Pagefind. This has feature parity with the Node/npx binary wrapper for running Pagefind, as well as feat
*️⃣ : These languages are the first right-to-left languages in the translation set. Please open any issues if improvements can be made to the Pagefind UI libraries when rendered for these RTL languages.
Nothing published for this version
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