The core WordPress search function is pretty good but the biggest problem with it is that it returns the results in a date order. The first results shown are the newest posts and pages. This is not terribly bad until you start to get quite a large WordPress site and some of the more relative pages for a search disappear to the bottom of the search results page.
Improving WordPress search functions.
Wordpress has thousands of plugins to help customise the functionality of your web site and improving the search is quite easy to do with a plugin. There are a number of plugins available to make the search results order much more relative to the search term rather than the date order that is default.
Two relevant search plugins impress me.
There are two which really stand out for me that will work in the latest version of WordPress – currently 3.2.1. Unfortunately many of the WordPress relevant search plugins are not maintained and do not work. The two plugins I like are the Relevant Search and Relevanssi.
Both of these relevant search plugins offers contextual searching and delivers good results. The Relevanssi is a much more feature packed plugin for searches offering rich snippets and highlighting of search terms. However you need to be running a more straight forward search.php file to get the most out of it. My search.php file at Wildlife News though has been customised to return wp ecommerce products. This means that while the search results still come back sorted by relevance the highlighting and rich snippet functions can not work (I’m not calling the standard the_excerpt()).
Because Relevanssi is such a feature packed plugin there is a downside and this is with the CPU cycles that it uses. Committing my web server processor to a lot of work and not being able to render a lot of the results means it’s a bit of a waste.
This makes the Relevant Search plugin much more suitable for sites that run custom search.php files. Relevant search is a simple replacement of date based search ability to a contextual and relevancy based search. There’s no added options or functions it’s just a simple change of the core search ability. It’s still more processor heavy than the standard date search but it’s a neat little basic change that really does deliver a much more effective search result.
Monitoring your on site searches.
The plugin seems to work without a problem with other search plugins – I run Search Meter on the Wildlife News site to monitor the keywords and phrases people are using on the site. This keeps me in touch with the subjects that are most popular and also lets me know if I do not have any content that is of interest to people.
At the moment I know that people on the site are looking for bird seed and also land use – these are the two most popular search terms (this is internal searching and not the keywords that people are using to find my site). I also know that recently a number of people have been searching my WordPress site for information about coyotes – because I have no current pages about coyotes it’s something on my list to write about, I know there’s a visitor need.
Taking a look at some of the search plugins for WordPress can really improve the web site for both you as a writer and web site owner and also for your visitors. Give your visitors a much more relevant search option and they are much more likely to click though and stay on your site.
The benefits of a good search functions will include more time spent on your site, more pages visited and a much stronger relationship between you and your site visitors. And that means they are much more likely to return in the future.
