Wordpress search how does it work

Ralevanssi has compatibility issues with popular page builder plugins , BuddyPress, NextGen Gallery, and a few more. WP Extended Search is a light weight and simple WordPress search plugin that allows you to easily extend the functionality of the default WordPress search.

You can simply go to the plugin settings and select the options that you want to include in the search. You can search in author name, taxonomies, post types, meta data, and more.

The plugin extends the default WordPress search so if you are already using it, then you are good to go. Better Search is another great way to replace the default WordPress search with a slightly better search engine.

It allows you to search across all post types and find more relevant results. You can also assign a weight to items and improve the quality of search results. It automatically replaces the default WordPress search.

It adds a simple checkbox for posts, pages, and WooCommerce products that you can check if you want to exclude it from the search results. SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin for most websites. It offers a nice range of features, quality of search results is great and is affordable for small businesses. It has a WooCommerce addon and a free live search addon, both of them make your WooCommerce product search incredibly powerful.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress search plugin for your website. You may also want to see our list of the must have WordPress plugins for small businesses, and the best WooCommerce plugins for all online stores. If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials.

You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook. Trusted by over 1. Thank you, glad you liked our article. I have been looking for a plugin for searching users and searching the site for a long time. Two in one. Help me please!!! Can anyone help me setup search form? I am not a programmer and my skillset is limited. We are a judicial website and i have created two different advanced search forms but cant get them to work. Please visit to see what i mean.

Thank you for any assistance. Does anyone know how any plugins to enhance the search UI itself? It would be nice to see a mention of search by colour… there was a plugin for this but it was discontinued. Adding a colour picker and allowing and searching for media by level of match to the colour is interesting. Interesting info.

Are there no free alternatives available for SearchWP 49 dollar or Swiftype starting form dollars a month! These are no beginners prices. The other plugins are nice add-ons. The exclude plugin may be the most useful of the bunch, really. Running a host a plugins to add minor improvements to the search results like highlighting is a waste of resources.

My phone will fill in voice searches without needing a plugin, and I hardly need it for a non-mobile machine. Anyone who does need voice commands to operate a computer will certainly already be using dedicated software vastly faster and superior to a plugin on some distant server.

Can you help me? Great plugins. I really wanna integrate add voice search plugin in my website. The process is similar to what you would do with Gutenberg. With a new page or post open and the Elementor editor activated, do a search for the WordPress search widget from your list of Elements:. Drag the Search element to where you want it to appear on the page. For example, this is a page that helps users get back on track with a search bar:.

As you can see, the page builder plugin gives you more control over where your WordPress search bar appears than Gutenberg does, allowing you to layer it over and within other content. In some cases, you may find a theme and template that automatically adds search to the content of your website.

The kinds of themes that do this, though, tend to be highly specialized, like the Residence Real Estate theme :.

Because search can get complicated on listings websites like these, it makes sense that the theme developer would build the functionality into the template.

Booking site themes are another example of ones that come with search functionality already built-in, just like this demo from the Travel Booking theme :. As you can imagine, having search already built into your WordPress theme and template will save a lot of trouble having to build out something this complex yourself.

And if the theme is optimized for performance , its search engine solution should be as well again, one less thing to worry about. Once you update the file, you can start using your shortcode on your website.

The shortcode gets added the way any regular text would be added to the site. Just remember to enclose it in brackets []. There are plenty of options you can use to add basic WordPress search functionality to your website.

But is that enough? Let me explain. As you can imagine, this is incredibly limiting for your users. The same goes for other elements of your website like:. The larger your website gets, the more difficult it will be for your database to process the results and the longer it will take to serve them to your visitors. So, what if you need something more powerful and sustainable than what WordPress search allows for?

You should read this next part about fixing WordPress search if at least one of the following applies to you:. Rather than leaving your visitors with a simple search bar to help them zip around your site, why not create a custom search page instead? What we want to do now is create a template for your search page.

Instead, you need to strip it back so that it only contains what you need on your search page. The WordPress Codex provides a bit more guidance on what you can and cannot do when creating a custom search page. Select the search template and Publish the page. And, if you used something similar to the code above, it will result in a page that looks something like this:. You can add it to your menu or link to it elsewhere.

Just make sure the link is placed somewhere where your visitors are apt to see it. Luckily for us, there are a number of plugins that will fix this. If all you want is to be able to comb through more content and metadata on your website, a good option is WP Extended Search. This is a lightweight and easy-to-configure plugin that improves basic search capabilities for smaller business websites and blogs.

If you have an ecommerce site , you can use the Advanced Woo Search plugin instead. When enabled, you can place the WooCommerce search form wherever you want on the site. The first is that the form searches your WooCommerce product content and metadata, including the title, SKU, excerpt, category, tag, and ID.

As your visitors begin to type their search queries, matching results appear. Tired of WordPress issues and a slow host? Check out our plans. By default, WordPress search displays results similar to this page. If there is a featured image like the jeans above , it will be displayed in full. This is just one matching result. Like the plugins mentioned above, Ivory Search enables you to choose which kinds of content and metadata search results are pulled from. You have your pick of the litter here:.

Another noteworthy tip about this plugin is that it lets you customize your search form alongside the rest of your website:. Beyond that, you can also configure things like live AJAX search and give your visitors the benefit of seeing their matches in real-time:.

Behaviors make the search experience more efficient for visitors, doing things like immediately opening the search form when they start typing and redirecting them to search results whether they hit the return key or the magnifying glass icon.

This makes it easier to spot more relevant results. In addition, you can tell the search engine to pull images from a certain place.

You can also decide how each image should be cropped and at what size. This way, you can make your search results pages more manageable in size and appearance — something that becomes extra important as the amount of content on your site grows.

It speeds up how quickly they get in front of your visitors, too:. With these three settings configured, you can help your web server not be as overwhelmed by continuous search requests. That said, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to optimizing WordPress search for speed. Keep reading to learn more about Elasticsearch. While the appearance and search capabilities of your WordPress search form are important, so too is how quickly it all happens.

Although Elasticsearch is open source and free to use, you will need managed Elasticsearch hosting for it which is not free. There are a number of ways you can obtain this:. This plugin is a popular solution to integrate with WordPress hosts that provide support for Elasticsearch.

Elastic If you want, you can go straight to the source: Elastic. You have a couple of options for deploying your search engine, too. You can get the full stack and take advantage of its advanced data processing and management tools.

This is part of the setup and onboarding process:. Recommendations are provided based on the kinds of queries your website will be handling, which makes it easy to decide how best to speed up and enhance your search engine. Amazon Elasticsearch It should come as no surprise that Amazon has an Elasticsearch service of its own. Another way to optimize WordPress search for speed is by caching your search results. Instead, it will retrieve and display a static search results page, providing visitors with near-instantaneous results.

Instead of going through all of the content, this little function will search only through post titles. In some cases, this might really help you get cleaner and faster search results:.

After the changes, you can open your website and start a new search. If you ever decide you want the old search back, simply erase or comment out the function. The default search function in WordPress is getting better and better with every update. You can easily include a search feature on your blog and allow people to easily find the content they want.

In this part of the article, we will show you how to allow your visitors to search only within specific categories which you can define in the code or allow visitors to select ones from the drop-down list. First, we will show you the code which will create a new search box.

This might help you with special categories which need a separate search box. For example, you may have a category that contains only smartphone reviews in it.

Makes sense, right? After you have made these changes, a new search box will appear and it will allow you to search through the category which ID you have entered in the code above.

If you want to search through multiple categories, simply add more IDs by entering numbers separated by commas. While this might be a great solution in some cases, there will be times when you will want to show a list of categories and allow visitors to choose where to search from.

Following the same example where you have categories like smartphones, desktop computers, laptops, home appliances, etc. Now you can easily add one or more categories which your visitors can easily search through. Whether you want people to select the category themselves or you want to specify those in the code, you are covered. By default, WordPress searches for everything on your site. If a user types a word or the entire phrase in a search box, he will get results from the entire website and that includes posts, pages, categories and tags, titles and content, etc.

If you want to modify the search box which already exists in your WordPress and define categories which will be included in the result pages, you may take a little different approach. Now that you have made the changes, search results will only get information from specified categories while the other ones will be excluded. Simply write category IDs separated by commas.

If your only goal is to exclude a category or two from the search results , you can do it much quicker; instead of typing in all the categories you want to include, you can exclude one by typing a minus - sign in front of the category ID. There you go. Now you can manage your search results more efficiently. If your pages contain contact information, maps, author info, etc. While there is no easy way of telling WordPress to exclude a post type from search results, you will need to do that by yourself:.

After you have made the changes and save them, you are free to visit your website and test the search engine. If so, you can make one simple change to the code and exclude posts instead of pages:.

Again, you will need to repeat those 3 simple steps shown above, but with a simple change in line 3. Instead of working with the code, we will show you a plugin that can do the same job for you and make everything much more user-friendly. Before you rush copy-pasting the code into your functions. You will need page IDs:.