Why "Rebuild All Indexes" Might Be the Worst Button in Business Manager

There’s a little button in Business Manager that should come with a big red label: Do not touch unless you're in a sandbox. Yes, we’re talking about that classic reflex. You update a product, refresh the PDP, and it’s still not showing. What’s the first instinct? Rebuild all indexes.

If you're doing this in a sandbox, fair enough. But if you're working in development, staging or worse, production, you're creating problems where there were none. You’re slowing things down. You’re potentially blocking users. And worst of all, you’re not even solving the real issue.

Let’s clear the air. A search index works like the index of a book. It helps you jump to the chapter you want without reading every single page. Same idea here. Salesforce Commerce Cloud creates indexes so your storefront can access relevant data fast, without digging through your whole catalog or content set.

Rebuilding an index tells the system to forget everything and start from scratch with fresh data. That can take time, especially if your catalog is large. So rebuilding everything just because a product didn’t show up is like buying a new car because the radio won’t turn on.

Each site has its own set of indexes. You’ll find them under Merchant Tools > Search > Search Indexes. There are six in total: Product, Content, Synonym, Suggestion, Active Data and Availability. If you want to go deeper, here's how updating individual indexes works.

Each one exists for a reason. If your change only affects products, there’s no need to touch Synonym or Active Data. Rebuilding all six is not only unnecessary, it's risky. You’re draining resources, risking timeouts, and potentially harming the customer experience for zero gain.

If you want to do things properly, start using scheduled indexing. You can schedule full rebuilds in development, staging and production, but Salesforce advises against doing it directly in production. Instead, rebuild on staging and replicate the index to production once everything looks fine.

Incremental indexing is your best friend during active development. It updates the index automatically whenever changes are made to products, categories or search config. You get near-real-time results, without triggering a full rebuild. The update usually happens within 30 seconds of a change.

That said, incremental indexing doesn’t cover everything. Some parts of the index still require a full rebuild from time to time, so doing a daily full rebuild on staging and replicating to production is a smart habit. Just don’t go hitting “Rebuild All” five times a day like you’re fixing something.

Let’s be honest. When you rebuild all indexes, what really happens? The platform starts multiple heavy operations. Database queries spike. Memory usage climbs. If you’re importing data at the same time, the process can get locked. And meanwhile, your customers might be stuck with a broken search or a slow site.

All because one product didn’t appear.

So here’s the smarter play:

Stop rebuilding everything. Rebuild only what’s necessary. Use scheduled indexing in staging. Replicate. Enable incremental indexing to move faster and safer. And remember that a slow search kills conversions faster than any other bug.

No one ever thanked you for making the site slower.

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