August 15, 2025
Thomas DiLascio
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Site Search APIs are flexible to interact with directly when building your search pages, and they come as pre-baked integrations in Site Search UI Kits.
Given there is flexibility to use either UI Kits or Drupal Views, below are important caveats to understand when using Drupal Views with Site Search:
Leverage Site Search UX Features
Without using UI Kits, many features in Site Search related to the search page UX will appear non-functional when you try toggling them on while using a Drupal View. The Drupal View governs the search page UX and overrides these features. This includes the following features:
- Results Fields
- Faceting
- Spell Check
- Sorting
- Smart Answers
- Related Searches
Once you have switched to UI Kits, you can dramatically reduce the time spent to make changes to the search page.
Does the business team want facets? Go to the Facets tab, click to enable and publish some facets within minutes.
Is marketing ready to add AI Smart Answers to the forefront of our website? Drop the additional Smart Answers component into your search page. After styling the component to your brand, you will have AI Smart Answers on your website.
UI Kits put your development team in a strong position to quickly adopt anything the business needs or wants especially as SearchStax continues to release features for various search use cases.
Limited Support for Additional Drupal Search Modules
Site Search has known compatibility with the following Drupal modules:
Other modules may work but would require testing before using in Production.
Inefficient Search API Utilization
The Search API is all encompassing which means a traditional site search implementation with UI Kits will generate one search request per user query.
This is a big advantage compared to the piecemeal approach in Drupal Views where additional features require their additional respective modules. Each module typically delivers its functionality by firing its own Search API requests as well, which then get packaged up with the search request itself. This means a site with Faceting, Autocomplete and Spell Check on Drupal Views could potentially consume 2 or perhaps even 4 or 5 search requests for a single user query. Not only are you consuming more searches from your search plan subscription, but these additional requests take time to package and be rendered as the final search page results for an end user.
Reduce Load on Drupal Servers
UI Kits interact with the Search API directly. Each search request no longer needs to be processed and add additional load to the Drupal server. For websites with publicly facing content where abstraction using a Drupal server is not required, this can directly improve not only the search experience but also user experience on a site that might have been having reached the max load previously during business hours when pushing all search requests through a Drupal View.
Unified Search Workbench
By bringing your front-end management of search pages, back-end relevancy and Search Analytics under one tool allows you to build or enable marketing and content teams to own comprehensive workflows around optimizing search performance and driving measurable business outcomes.
Hopefully these tradeoffs help you make informed decisions on how best to integrate your front-end search experiences with all the powerful capabilities in Site Search.
