I have a query loop that outputs a list of businesses from an ACF custom posts type. Each result is a card with dynamically populated content (post title, address, category, etc.)
I have a few dropdown/checkbox filters set up to narrow down these results by taxonomy terms and I also have a live search filter so that the user can find a business directly by name. The dropdown and checkbox filters work great but the live search has gotten very slow as the number of business posts has grown. It was fast when there were only a couple hundred businesses but we are now at over 1500 and the live search results take about 13 seconds to display results.
I’ve tried optimizing the database, deleting post revisions, have redis cache and heartbeat control active on the server for ajax caching - nothing seems to help.
When I search a businesses by typing the name in an ACF field on the admin side, the results come up fast - so I don’t think it’s a database issue. I suspect the frontend live search is slow because its searching through a lot of dynamically populated data rather than a simple list.
Is there any way to speed this up?