Improving WordPress Advanced Site Search and Indexing

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Improving WordPress Advanced Site Search and Indexing

What is WordPress Search and Why Its Important

As search results are used by visitors to find answers to questions ranging from the company’s return policy to finding products, thus its display, speed, and capacity should be up to the mark. People expect accurate and quick results but the basic WordPress CMS search feature isn’t capable of all this. That’s why, in this blog, we will be going through some options that you can use to improve the overall performance of the site search and indexing. But first, let's get you all caught up with some basic info regarding WordPress search

The search option is used by visitors to find other sections of your website without having to explore the entire site. As the visitor wants relevant results within seconds, so you need to get yourself the best WordPress search plugin that you can get your hands on. With a great search plugin, you will be able to provide the visitor with a user-friendly option to find any content they might be looking for. Other major reasons as to why you need to upgrade the search plugin are:

Improving WordPress Advanced Site Search and Indexing
  • The content becomes easier to reach and more visible
    People likely visit your site for specific content. For example, if you operate a news site that has more than 39 pages, then you will benefit significantly from a search bar, which the visitor can use to locate the specific news they wanted to learn about. So instead of browsing and clicking aimlessly, the audience can use the sites highly optimized internal search option and get the most relevant results
  • It informs you regarding the audience preferences
    Search plugins intend to keep a record of what the visitor was looking for when they visited the site. This information is vital in helping you determine what your audience is leaning towards. You can use this for your advantage and generate more content like that.
  • Navigation is improved
    With Google being such a pro in displaying accurate results within minutes, everyone expects hyper-results regardless of which site they are on. On having a useful WordPress index and search plugin, your visitor will get directed instantly to results.
  • It helps you in the long run
    Another major advantage of having an excellent WordPress search tool is that it helps get more page views, clicks, that may result in revenue.
Advanced Features and Functions of a Well Implemented Site Search

What Can You do to Improve WordPress Search on Your Site?

Creating your Search Page

Fortunately, there are many options available that you can utilize to advance the site search and index feature of your website. Instead of just having a simple search bar on your site, you can create your very own search page and customize it. With a dedicated search page, the visitor's experience will be enhanced. To accomplish this task, you will require backend access to the website. This can be done using a file manager or through FTP.

On accessing the database of WordPress, you will have to locate the page.ph file. This file defines the web pages basic structure and you can create the template for the search page here. This way, you can edit and alter the search bar in whatever way you want. This task will obviously require coding, time, and effort but it will save you cash, as you will not have to purchase a plugin.

Advancing the Search Results

I bet you didn’t know that you could extend the WordPress search beyond just posts and pages. Surprise surprise, you can! By creating your search bar, you will be able to assign a place to run searches but wouldn’t be able to dictate what type of content you want to be searched. On using the WP extended search plugin, this issue can be tackled. With this plugin, you can explore more metadata and content on the website. Some examples of content the visitors can retrieve results from include: pages, media files, tags, posts, excerpts, author names, and categories. The best thing about this plugin is that it is easy-to-configure and lightweight. For improving the basic search capabilities of smaller business blogs and websites, this is a great choice. On the other hand, for e-commerce sites, the Advanced Woo Search plugin is the ultimate choice.

Improving the Search Display (Ivory Search/ AJAX Search Plugin)

As typical displays might seem boring so you can use some plugins that will alter the way results are displayed. For example, Ivory Search lets you select the content type to display and how to show it. On using Ivory Search, you can customize the search bar and alter the style, loader image, colors, form animation, and other aspects of the search form. On using the AJAX search, you can use the live search feature and let visitors see the result match in real-time.

Speeding up the Search (Elasticsearch+Logstach+Kibana)

While the search capabilities and appearance of WordPress search are essential, the same is the case with how quickly results are displayed. For this, you can use Elasticsearch, which is an analytics and open search engine, that ensures optimum experience while searching results. Using Logstash (for data processing) and Kibana (for data visualization and management) along with Elasticsearch, the search engine of your website will work smoothly.

Note: Even though Elasticsearch is free to use, you will require Elasticsearch hosting, which isn’t free.

Finding the right solution unique to your business

Clarity WordPress Experts

Though there are many great options available in WordPress, sadly, the default search function isn’t one of the features that one looks forward to using. For those of you that want the best for their site, this might be a setback but fear not with this guide at your disposal, you are good to go. If you liked reading this informative blog, then make sure to check out the rest of our WordPress resources.

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