# What changed in pagefind

> 21 changes in pagefind 1 from its official release notes, upgrade guides and advisories: 1 breaking, 5 new APIs and options. Each one cited. Sources checked 2026-10-19. HTML: https://unstale.sh/npm/pagefind/

To see which of these apply to a repository, run `npx @unstale/cli init` in it.

## pagefind 1

### Breaking changes

- Crate consumers can enable actix-web and related serving dependencies through the serve feature flag. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)

### New APIs and options

- Set to true to disable diacritic normalization and require exact diacritic matches. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- The includeCharacters option is now available in the Node and Python wrapper APIs. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Search results now include a field listing which metadata fields matched the query. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Configure the cache-busting tag on the metadata file, which is fetched fresh on every page load; this can be overridden for offline and PWA service-worker scenarios. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Search results and sub-results now include excerpt text without highlight mark tags, allowing consumers to handle highlighting themselves or omit it. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)

### Performance

- Linux musl builds now achieve the 2x indexing performance claimed for v1.4.0 after jemalloc replaced the thrashing musl allocator. (1.5.2) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.2)
- Index chunks are about 45% smaller due to delta-encoding page numbers and word locations. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- The indexing binary is smaller to download and faster to run; indexing is more than twice as fast on some sites. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)

### Behavior and default changes

- Index filenames are more deterministic between indexes. (1.5.2) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.2)
- Search queries in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are segmented with Intl.Segmenter, so users no longer need to delimit query words. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Search matches across diacritics by default, while preferring exact diacritic matches in ranking. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Index chunk fetches are throttled to avoid overwhelming the network on large sites. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Pages that match a query only in metadata now appear in search results. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Pagefind searches metadata by default, including title metadata, and metadata matches affect result ranking. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Stemming support is added for Polish and Estonian, and stemming quality improves across many already-supported languages. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Search runs in a Web Worker automatically to keep the main thread responsive, falling back to the main thread when Web Workers are unavailable. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)

### Fixes and other changes

- A deprecation warning that appeared in the browser console was cleaned up. (1.5.2) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.2)
- Relative image URLs such as ./image.png no longer break when displayed in search results. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Subresult URLs now respect page meta URL overrides. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)
- Windows ARM64 is now a supported platform. (1.5.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind/releases/tag/v1.5.0)