While WordPress has a lot of great features built in, one feature that isn’t quite as top notch is the built in search options for the whole site for users to find the info they are looking for. Thankfully, as with most things on WordPress, there are a couple of great plugins that can be used to achieve this goal. When adding a search bar to your site, there are a few things to keep in mind.
As is always the case with WordPress, make sure you are only installing reputable plugins. There are a few plugins for adding better search functionality that I’ve looked into, and my favorite is Ivory Search. The main thing I really like about Ivory Search is – get this – it works really well. While the plugin doesn’t have quite as many active users as I’d normally like to see, it does have fairly regular updates that give me the peace of mind needed to use the plugin.
Extra search functionality on a site is a great tool to add in, but from a visual or design standpoint, things can get a little tricky. Oftentimes, having the full search bar on the page can look dated or it can be tough to visually fit it into the design. A great way to avoid this issue is to use the built in functionality of Ivory Search to use a search icon (often a magnifying glass) that, once clicked upon, will expand out the full search bar. By using this technique, search functionality can easily be added to almost any page or navigation while simultaneously maintaining the integrity of the site design and providing the search feature to users.
We don’t add a search bar feature to every site we build at Full Scope Creative, but if we are building a particularly large site, we’ll often times look to add in the search bar and functionality. When we look to add in a search bar, Ivory Search is often our go-to plugin to use.