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 1. 
 2. SEO blog
 3. User eXperience (UX)
 4. Optimizing internal search in WordPress


OPTIMIZING INTERNAL SEARCH IN WORDPRESS

14 July 2021 | 3 Comments | Tag User eXperience (UX)


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WordPress comes with a basic internal search system, but it has lots of room for
improvement. If your webpage has more than just a few pages, you should
definitely make sure that you’re providing a great internal search experience.
Read on to understand why!


SEARCH IS HOW WE… SEARCH

In the early days of the internet, users navigated the web by clicking through
lists and directories of links. However, as search engines became more popular,
that behavior changed. Now, Google (and others) have normalized search as the
way in which we explore the web. Instead of just hopping from link to link, we
describe what we want, and get a list of options.

Chances are, your users have the same expectations of your website. Many of the
people who arrive at your website will have a specific question in mind. Or
maybe they’re looking for a specific piece of information. If they don’t
immediately see what they’re looking for, then they’ll likely expect to be able
to search. After all, that’s much easier than having to learn how your website
is structured and browsing through your lists of links.

If there’s no option to search, a confused or lost user might simply leave your
website. And if that happens a lot, it might create the kinds of negative user
experience signals which may lead Google to think that your pages aren’t good
results. But if you provide a great search experience, that might create
positive user experience signals, which may benefit your SEO.


WORDPRESS’ INTERNAL SEARCH IS OKAY

The good news is that WordPress supports internal search “out of the box”. Many
themes come with a search box in the header, sidebar or footer. Users can type
in a keyword or phrase, and WordPress will send them to a page that lists the
top content on the site which matches that search.

But the results aren’t always great. It’s not always clear what you’re looking
at. It can be hard to sort, filter, and find the right result. And it’s not
always clear how to even search in the first place.

If you’re using the default WordPress’ search feature, there’s a lot that you
can do to avoid these problems and to provide a great user experience.


OPTIMIZING YOUR INTERNAL SEARCH EXPERIENCE

Your internal search system is typically split into three parts. There’s a form
where users input their query, the page that displays the results, and the
underlying system which delivers those results. There are a lot of ways in which
you can assess and improve each of these, in order to provide a great user
experience.


THE SEARCH FORM

The search form is where your users start their search. But only if they can
find or recognize it! To make sure that people use your search system, you
should make sure that:

 * It’s easy to find. People might overlook search features in menus, footers,
   or other ‘hidden’ areas.
 * It’s obvious and recognizable. Input fields should look like input fields, so
   use a search icon, and say ‘search’ in the placeholder.
 * It behaves conventionally. Fancy features which change how the input field
   looks, works or behaves might confuse or challenge users. Customizations and
   enhancements shouldn’t break the basics.
 * It has a ‘search button‘. Hitting ‘enter’ should submit the form, but users
   who don’t know that should be able to click a helpfully labelled ‘submit’
   button instead.

Yoast.com features a prominent and recognizable search option in the main
navigation


THE SEARCH RESULTS PAGE

Once users have typed and submitted their search query, they’ll expect a set of
results. Those should help them to quickly identify the best answer to their
question (or to try again with a new search term). To streamline that as much as
possible, you should make sure that:

 * Results are ranked by relevancy. Older versions of WordPress used to order
   results by date, so make sure you’re up to date!
 * Results contain relevant snippets. Seeing the title, (revelant) excerpt, and
   potentially even the thumbnail image of each result helps users to narrow
   down the list.
 * The search keyword is highlighted. Showing the term the user searched for in
   the context of each result makes it easier to understand the context and
   content of each result.
 * The right types of content are shown. Users on an ecommerce store probably
   don’t want to see your blog posts in your search results. You probably also
   don’t want to include private, unpublished, or otherwise non-public content.
   Managing which content types are included (or allowing users to filter the
   results) is key to delivering a good result.
 * There’s useful metadata and tools. Showing the number of results and
   providing pagination can help the user identify when a search might have been
   too generic.
 * It’s easy to search again. Including a search form in the content or template
   area, perhaps in addition to the one in the header or sidebar, makes it easy
   to refine and search again.
 * There’s a good ‘no results’ experience. Empty results pages should help the
   user to understand the situation, make suggestions, provide helpful links,
   and guide them to a successful outcome.
 * It’s all noindexed, or blocked entirely. It’s best practice to keep your
   internal search results pages out of Google and other search engines (Yoast
   SEO handles this automatically for you)!

Yoast.com’s search results page highlights text and allows users to filter by
content type and author

BLOCK YOUR SITE’S SEARCH RESULT PAGES

Let’s dive a little deeper into the last tip: “It’s all noindexed, or blocked
entirely“. Why is it better to prevent your internal search results pages from
being shown in Google?

Most importantly, sending a user from a set of search results to a set of search
results is a poor experience. People searching on Google want answers, products,
information and a destination. If they have to search again or browse through a
second set of search results, then they’re unlikely to have a good experience.

From a technical perspective, it’s good practice to help Google avoid crawling
and indexing ‘infinite spaces’ like search results. You usually won’t want
search engines to be spending resources exploring these types of URLs, at the
expense of them spending time and energy on your more important content.

There are two ways options for managing how internal search URLs are crawled and
indexed:

 1. You can allow search engines to crawl internal search results pages, but
    prevent them from indexing them by using a meta robots tag with a value
    of noindex, follow. Yoast SEO sets this for you automatically by default.
    This approach allows them to discover content linked to from these pages,
    but might mean they get lost or waste resources exploring.
 2. You can prevent search engines from crawling by using a robots.txt disallow
    rule. This will guarantee that search engines don’t visit (or get lost in)
    your search results page, but it might cause some side effects. Notably,
    search engines won’t be able to discover pages linked from internal search
    results pages, and results pages might still get indexed. Yoast SEO
    Premium’s crawl cleanup settings allow you to configure this behaviour, or,
    you can manually edit your robots.txt file.


THE UNDERLYING SYSTEM

Many WordPress websites rely on the ‘native’ search functionality which comes
built into the software. However, there are several third-party systems and
plugins which can radically improve the quality of your results.

We’re big fans of the SearchWP and Relevanssi WordPress plugins; both of which
do a great job of allowing fine-grained customization (such as handling plurals
and stemmed words), as well as searching all sorts of content formats; from
product attributes to custom fields, to text in PDF files. Both plugins provide
lots of tools, tricks and settings to help you ensure that your users find what
they’re looking for.

Relevanssi includes extensive settings for customizing how searches are handled

But there’s still a problem. Both of these platforms are still limited by
operating within WordPress’ confines; which can limit their performance,
flexibility, and capabilities. If you’d like to unlock even more firepower and
customizations, then we recommend using a ‘hosted solution’ – which means that
the data and search process happens on their servers, not yours.

We’re big fans of Algolia; they’re one of the leading players in the market when
it comes to hosted search solutions. Unfortunately, they discontinued their
official WordPress plugin; however, the team at WebDevStudios is maintaining a
new version. We’re particularly keen on this approach because it integrates
cleverly with the Algolia feature in Yoast SEO.

With some very minor tinkering, you can use Yoast SEO’s internal linking data
(which records which of your posts link to each other) as a ‘weight’ in your
search logic. That means that your most linked-to content is more likely to rank
highly in your internal search results. That means that users are more likely to
find your best content.

You can read more about how to configure that integration here.

Many of the more sophisticated search systems (including Algolia) also offer
‘live search’ capabilities. These return results as the user types into the
search box. That might help users to find what they’re looking for without even
needing to submit their search. It may even completely remove the need for them
to visit the search results page.

Real-time search results on yoast.com, as you type


EXTRA TIPS


USE INTERNAL SEARCH ANALYTICS TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE

Not only is providing a robust, feature-rich internal search system helpful for
your users – it can also help you to improve your website and your content.

Tracking systems (like Google Analytics, and some plugins’ own monitoring
systems) can record how visitors use the search system. Data on what people
search for, and whether it looks like they find what they’re looking for, can be
invaluable when optimizing your site. This article on Moz has some great tips on
where to start, with nothing more than a basic setup and Google Analytics. More
sophisticated setups, like Algolia, can provide much more sophisticated analysis
and deeper insight.

Identifying bad experiences – like searches with no results, or where people
don’t find what they’re looking for – is the first step to fixing them. That
might mean improving content, writing new content and pages, or just doing some
digital housekeeping!


EXPOSE YOUR INTERNAL SEARCH IN GOOGLE

You may have seen that sometimes, Google may show a search input field within
the search results for a site. When a user searches from that field, Google
sends them directly to the search results page on that site.

An example ‘sitelinks search box’, from Google’s developer documentation

This is typically powered by structured data, which Yoast SEO automatically
outputs on your site. Google won’t always show this (and will rarely show it at
all on small or simple websites) but may choose to if it thinks that it’ll help
users to navigate larger or more complex sites.

Note that you can opt-out of this by adding the following meta tag to all of
your pages:

<meta name="google" content="nositelinkssearchbox" />


DISABLING SEARCH IN WORDPRESS

If we’ve not convinced you that providing a great internal search experience is
a good idea, then don’t worry. It’s possible to disable the internal search
functionality on your WordPress website.

At least, sort of. There’s not actually a native way to simply ‘turn off’ search
on a WordPress site. In fact, many websites simply remove (or never build) a
search bar, without realizing that anybody appending ?s=search-term to their
website will be sent to a search results page. What’s worse is, these templates
and pages are rarely styled (or built/defined at all). That means, when you view
them, they often seem broken and confusing.

If you don’t want users to be able to search on your site, you’ll need to tinker
with your theme logic to remove the dead-ends. Alternatively, you can use a
plugin like this one.

Jono Alderson

Jono is our Head of SEO, and part of our leadership team. He's a digital
strategist, marketing technologist, and full stack developer. He's into
technical SEO, emerging technologies, and brand strategy.


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3 RESPONSES TO OPTIMIZING INTERNAL SEARCH IN WORDPRESS

 1. Sandip Trivedi  • 2 years ago
    
    Businesses win more customers by getting them found the first page on Google
    search. If one is not on the first page, chances are he/she is losing
    customers to competition just because of not implementing an effective SEO
    strategy. SEO is an ongoing process and needs constant monitoring and
    adjustments of your website.
    
    
 2. Naijaknowhow  • 2 years ago
    
    Awesome content. Thanks!
    
    
     * Amy Lees  • 2 years ago
       
       Thanks, we’re glad you liked it!
       
       

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put that knowledge into practice during our workshops.

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