Three Ways to Improve WordPress Search

by Vipe Team in WordPress Development; Published on 09.03.2020 Last updated on 02.07.2021

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In this part of our WordPress Search series, we hit the ground running with more ways to improve the search experience on your WordPress website.

Advanced Woo Search

You’re in luck if your website is of the eCommerce variety because then this plugin will come in handy.

Once the plugin is part of your website, its WooCommerce search form can go wherever you need it on the site. If you need to swap out all the basic search forms that you already have, the “Seamless integration” option in the plugin will make the change automatically and quickly.

If instead, you are more the hands-on type, you can also take the widget route or add a shortcode to use the form.

While the Advanced Woo Search form will ‘look’ similar to the basic WordPress form that you’re used to, it’s quite a different beast under the hood in two ways:

Your shiny new search form is now equipped to search product content on WooCommerce, and even metadata like product title, category, SKU, tag, ID, and excerpt.
Live search results. Yes, you heard us right. The plugin uses AJAX, which is the same magic that Google has been using in their products, to give you instantaneous results that appear as the visitor types in the query.

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Remember that web search engine experience we talked about in Part 1? We’re getting there now.

Fix How WordPress Displays Search Results – the Ivory Search Plugin

The default search result display on WordPress screams “basic!” – There’s a heading up top specifying the keyword you searched for, a list of all the matches it finds, and if there’s an image in the results, it will be shown as a full image, with a full-length excerpt right below it. Picture one search result taking up nearly all your screen space, and then, picture having to wade through hundreds of these ‘results’. Too clunky.

Enter Ivory Search. Similar to the plugins we’ve already discussed, this one does have more options. The real prize, though, is that you’re spoilt for choice here. Ivory Search lets you choose, from an extensive set, what you want the search form to search in.

Ivory Search will also help you personalize the search form just like the rest of the website, using your theme’s Customizer options – that’s colors, style, animations, loader image, text, you name it.
Plus, you can enable and tweak live AJAX search with this plugin, for live search icing on top.

Tailor Your Search Results Page To Your Liking With Ajax Search

Now that you’ve made the search results page look as snazzy as the rest of your website, it’s time to step up the rest of the experience. Ajax Search Lite (or the Pro variant) is a plugin to make the results page clever and fast, for example, with:

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Search behaviors

Behaviors are behind-the-scenes elves doing little things that add up to a whole lot, such as expanding the search form the moment the visitor starts typing or bringing up the results page when the visitor hits ‘Enter’ or clicks the search icon.

Autocomplete and search suggestions

These are familiar features of Google Search that boost the search speed by that tiny bit more.

Highlight keywords

This, as the name says, lights up every instance of the keyword(s) in the search results so that visitors can quickly judge the relevance of each result in the matches.

Quick search optimizations

The plugin lets you use a Custom AJAX handler, control whether Javascript can be loaded in the page footer, and disable cropping of images, thus easing the load on the webserver when your site becomes big enough to deal with continuous search requests.

You also get to use this plugin to determine the structure of your results page, or what content should appear in each search result. It’ll let you choose what image to use for a search result – such as using the first available image when a featured image is absent – or the cropping and sizing of each image, in turn making the search results that much more manageable and visually appealing.

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As you might’ve noticed, all of these are familiar features on many popular search forms and search engines, so now you can get in on some of that goodness. You’re welcome. To Part 4 soon, where we continue this WordPress Search journey.