A search bar is one of the important aspects of your website. The visitors to your website would instantly be able to find out whatever they are in search of at the moment. The search box on your website acts as a Google and lets the users find their important thing as soon as possible. It would be even better if you know how to add voice search for WordPress. That will make things easier for users. When your website is capable of showing up the relevant results immediately, it will attract more traffic. A search panel is included in most of the WordPress themes.
However, if you want to make a custom search box of your own, you can even do that easily. WordPress is popular for its customizability and therefore there are various methods to add the search bar to your website.
Methods of adding a search bar
Apart from the WordPress widget of the search option, other plug-ins will help you to add a search panel. All the methods are described with simple steps.
Using the WordPress search widget – This is a convenient way to add a search option to your website and you can do it from your dashboard:
- Visit the Admin dashboard of your account
- Go to Appearance> Widgets. Under the option “Available Widgets”, you will find the widget named “search”.
- Click on it and then press the button “Add Widget”. You can also drag it to the Widget Area. It would allow you to add a relevant title to the search widget if required.
- Finally, visit your website and you would be able to view the search widget on the sidebar of the page.
Use a plug-in – This is yet another automated method you can use to resolve the issue of the WordPress search bar not working. You would not require any technical or coding knowledge at all.
- Go to Plug-in> Add New
- Search for a plug-in that adds a search bar and is quick and hassle-free for example WP Fastest Site Search by Expertrec.
- Install the plug-in correctly and activate it following the instructions that you see on the screen.
- Go to Settings> Add search to Menu and configure the plug-in to add the search feature.
Add a search box manually – For this, you would need some technical knowledge and you will get complete control of styling and customization:
- Depending on where you want to add the search button, open the sidebar.php file or header.php.
- Add ” <?php get_search_form(); ?> in” in your code and it will collect the search form from the searchform.php template and if searchform.php is missing, it will create one.
- If you have added the function in header.php, you will find the search box on the upper panel. If you have added it in sidebar.php, you will find the search box in the side menu of your website’s homepage.
WordPress is quite easy to use and customize. Therefore, you can use any of the ways mentioned above to add a search bar and there is indeed an importance of search in website. A perfect search bard would improve the user experience on your website and sear up the engagement.