Do you want to use Google search on your WordPress site?
By default, WordPress comes with a built-in search feature, but it is not very good. By adding Google Search in its place, you can display more accurate and relevant search results to visitors.
In this article, we will show you how to easily add Google Search to a WordPress site.
Why Should You Use Google Search in WordPress?
The default WordPress search feature is not very useful and often fails to find relevant results to user queries. This forces many site owners to look for alternatives.
You can use a popular WordPress search plugin. However, the problem is that you still have to manage that plugin, and it will have an impact on your server resources.
On the other hand, you can use Google’s reliable and powerful search feature instead. It is free, allows you to limit the search to your sites only, and can be run from your WordPress site.
Plus, the Google search is fast, users already trust the brand, and you will not have to maintain or update it. You can even allow users to search external websites on Google if needed.
Having said that, let’s see how you can easily add a Google site search to your WordPress site.
How to Add Google Search to a WordPress Site
You can easily add Google Search to your WordPress site by visiting the Google Programmable Search Engine website.
From here, click the ‘Get Started’ button.
This will direct you to the ‘Create a new search engine’ page, where you must add a name for the search form you are about to create.
Next, select the ‘Search specific sites or pages’ option in the ‘What to search?’ section and add your WordPress site’s URL.
Now, the Googe Site Search will only index the content available on your website. However, if you want Google to show search results from other websites as well, then you can choose the ‘Search the entire web’ option.
Next, scroll down and toggle on the ‘Image Search’ option to allow your Google Search form to index images on your website. We recommend this option if you sell photos online, have a photography website, or run a travel blog.
After that, you can also toggle on the ‘Safe Search’ switch so that users won’t be shown inappropriate results for their queries.
Once you are done, click the ‘Create’ button.
Google will now generate your search engine ID code for you.
From here, simply copy the code and paste it into a notepad app or plain text editor.
Now, you must visit your WordPress dashboard and edit your theme files to add the search to your site’s <body>. However, this can be risky, and the smallest error can break your website.
That is why we recommend using WPCode instead. It is the best WordPress code snippets plugin on the market that makes it safe and easy to add custom code.
Note: WPCode has a free plan that you can use for this tutorial. However, upgrading to the pro version will give you access to more features like smart conditional logic, a cloud library of code snippets, and more.
Upon activation, visit the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress admin sidebar. Here, click the ‘Use Snippet’ button under the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option.
This will take you to the ‘Create Custom Snippet’ page, where you can type any name you like for the snippet. Then, select ‘Universal Snippet’ as the code type from the dropdown menu on the right.
Once you do that, simply paste the Google Search Engine ID into the ‘Code Preview’ box.
Then, scroll down to the ‘Insertion’ section and select the ‘Auto Insert’ mode. The Google Search form will be automatically added to your site upon activation.
After that, you can expand the ‘Location’ dropdown menu to choose where you want to display your search box.
For example, if you want to display the search form at the top of all your pages and posts, then you can select the ‘Insert Before Post’ option.
Next, scroll back to the top and toggle the ‘Inactive’ switch to ‘Active’.
Finally, click the ‘Save Snippet’ button to store your settings.
You have successfully added a Google Site search form manually.
You can now visit your WordPress blog to see it in action.
Alternative: Use SearchWP to Create an Amazing Search Form
If you find it difficult to add Google Site Search to your website or you are looking for an alternative, then you can use SearchWP for internal search.
It is the best WordPress search plugin on the market that automatically replaces the default search form and allows users to find anything they need on your site.
SearchWP is used by over 30,000 websites and lets you create a custom relevance scale to adjust the search algorithm.
You can also make any part of your site searchable including PDFs, custom post types, media, comments, custom fields, WooCommerce products, and more.
If you have a multilingual site, then you can also create a multilingual search with the plugin.
However, you must keep in mind that, unlike Google Search, the plugin can only index and show results for content available on your website.
Did you come across annoying things in WordPress and now looking for ways to fix them?
Like most things in life, WordPress also has its fair share of annoying things. Dealing with these annoyances is very easy with the right system and processes.
In this article, we will show you the 15 most annoying things about WordPress and how to fix them.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source website builder and content management system (CMS). It was created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003.
Over 43% of the websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. You can create all kinds of websites using WordPress. For instance, you can create a blog, start an online store, build a membership community, sell online courses, make a small business site, and more.
Do note that there is a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. The latter is a website and blog hosting platform, while WordPress.org is an open-source software used by millions of people (including WPBeginner).
To get started with a WordPress website, you’ll need a domain name and website hosting. A domain name is like the address to your house, while web hosting is where your website lives, like a building.
With all its popularity, WordPress isn’t perfect. There are a few quirks and shortcomings that can be frustrating for users.
That said, let’s look at some of the most annoying things about WordPress and how you can easily fix them. You can click the links below to jump ahead to any section:
WordPress does not come with a built-in backup system. You are supposed to create your own backups instead of relying on your WordPress hosting company.
Having a regular backup saves you the frustration when something bad happens to your website. You can easily restore your website from a backup in case something fails or there is a security breach.
There are several ways to backup a WordPress site. The easiest way is by using a plugin. There are plenty of free and paid backup solutions available for WordPress. See our comparison of the 7 best WordPress backup plugins.
For instance, you can use Duplicator to create a complete backup of your site’s important files, databases, folders, and more. The plugin is very easy to use and also lets you schedule regular website backups.
Besides that, you can also your web hosting provider’s cPanel or manually backup databases and other content on your website.
WordPress comes with two built-in taxonomies, they are called categories and tags. By default, each new post you create is filed into a built-in category titled Uncategorized.
If you forget to assign the post to a category, then it will be filed under Uncategorized. This looks unprofessional, but you can easily fix it.
First, WordPress lets you rename the categories on your website. Simply head to Post Categories from the WordPress dashboard and then click the ‘Edit’ link under the Uncategorized category.
From here, you can rename the category to anything you want.
If you have other categories created on your website, then WordPress lets you change the default settings and use another category instead.
Simply navigate to Settings » Writing from the WordPress admin panel and click the ‘Default Post Category’ dropdown menu. Next, you can change it from Uncategorized to any other category.
During WordPress installation or at the time of user creation, you can choose a username for the account.
However, the problem is that there’s no easy way to change the username once it’s created. This can be extremely annoying.
One of the ways to fix this is by deleting the user and creating a new user with the updated username. Another way to resolve this is by using a WordPress plugin or manually updating the username from the WordPress database.
4. Adding More Formatting Options to the Content Editor
Before the introduction of Gutenberg or block editor, WordPress had limited formatting options. You’d have to play around with HTML and CSS to edit the appearance of your blog posts and pages.
However, the WordPress content editor now offers a lot of customization options. You can format your content more easily and don’t have to rely on coding.
While new features are introduced with every new version of WordPress, many users may feel frustrated if they don’t find a formatting option.
For instance, you might want to use a specific font for your content but can’t find it in WordPress. To fix this, you can use different plugins to add custom fonts.
Another annoying thing you might face in WordPress is the white screen of death. The worst part about the error is that there is no message, and you’re locked out of WordPress.
Most of the time, the error occurs because a script on your site exhausted the memory limit. When the unresponsive script gets killed by the WordPress hosting server or times out, you’ll see this error.
There are different ways to fix the white screen of death error. For instance, you can check whether the issue is occurring on other websites of yours. You can also try to increase the memory limit, disable all the plugins, clear the cache, and more.
Sometimes you may end up locking yourself out of the WordPress admin area. Either you forgot your password and were unable to recover it, or something broke when you were adding code or a plugin.
Or there was an error establishing a connection between the database, there was an internal server error, or your site was hacked.
To help you resolve this issue, we have created a handy guide on what to do when you are locked out of the WordPress admin area. It will help you learn how to fix this in different scenarios.
7. Deactivating All WordPress Plugins without Admin Access
When troubleshooting some problems on your WordPress site, you will be advised to deactivate all WordPress plugins. You can just go to the plugins page and deactivate all plugins.
However, what if you don’t have access to the WordPress admin area?
You can deactivate plugins by using an FTP client. Simply access the /wp-content/ folder to view all the plugins and then deactivate them.
If you have access to the web hosting service’s cPanel, then you can also deactivate plugins from the phpMyAdmin settings.
WordPress comes with a slight learning curve, and you get to learn things as you go along. Some things are easier to learn than others. The most frustrating and annoying thing for beginners is the number of common WordPress errors they may come across.
For instance, you might see a syntax error, your posts might be returning a 404 error, there can be an issue when uploading images, and more.
9. Setting up Automatic Updates for WordPress Plugins
All good WordPress plugins are regularly updated. If you are using the best WordPress plugins on your website, then chances are that you will be installing updates quite often.
Installing updates takes only a few seconds, but it can be distracting to log in and find new updates.
To resolve this, you can simply head to Plugins » Installed Plugins from your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Enable auto-updates’ for critical plugins.
While you can create galleries in the default WordPress installation, it’s not as useful because it lacks features like Albums, tagging, light boxes, and more.
Many WordPress landing pages and theme builders like SeedProd also offer options to add image galleries to your website.
11. WordPress Plugins Can Conflict with Each Other
WordPress plugins are great for adding additional functionality and features to your website.
However, some plugins can conflict with one another, causing serious problems. For instance, they might not work properly like they’re intended to work or would end up breaking your site.
Having too many plugins can also lead to conflicts. You should deactivate and delete plugins that are not in use. This will help solve conflicts, strengthen WordPress security, and boost page load time.
12. Customizing WordPress Excerpts
By default, WordPress displays full posts on the homepage, archives, and category pages.
This not only creates duplicate content on your site, but it also makes navigation more frustrating and discourages users from viewing the full post and leaving comments.
By displaying excerpts on these pages, you can increase your pageviews and user engagement. It shows a short summary and tells users what the content is about.
WordPress also shows your full articles in the RSS Feed. This means users reading your posts in a feed reader will have no reason to visit your website.
You can easily change this from the WordPress admin area. Go to Settings » Reading page and scroll down to ‘For each article in a feed, include’ option and select Excerpt.
Next, click on the save changes button to store your settings.
14. Dealing with Comment Spam
Spam comments are one of the most annoying things on the internet. WordPress comes with built-in comment moderation to deal with spam comments. However, comment spam can quickly grow, and before you know it, you will be spending more time moderating comments.
The first thing you need to do is start using Akismet. It will catch most spam comments and keep them away from your moderation queue.
WordPress comes with a built-in search feature, but it’s not very good. If a search is important for your website, then you will need to replace the default search with something better.
To improve WordPress search, you can use plugins like SearchWP. It helps you customize the search algorithm and include tables, custom fields, documents, taxonomies, and more in the search process.
If you have a furniture business, then setting up an online store will allow you to reach a wider audience. This can help you increase conversions by allowing customers to go through the entire product catalog on your website.
In this article, we will show you how to easily sell furniture online in WordPress, step by step.
Which Is the Best Website Builder to Sell Furniture Online?
WordPress is the best website builder to sell furniture online. It powers over 43% of websites on the internet, is super easy to use, scalable, and has powerful features.
WordPress is used by many eCommerce stores, and there are plenty of free WordPress eCommerce plugins that you can use. This means that you will be able to easily set up a store and keep more of your profits.
However, before choosing WordPress as your website builder, keep in mind that there are two types of WordPress.
WordPress.com is a blog hosting platform, while WordPress.org is an open-source, self-hosted software. For more detailed information, you may want to see our comparison between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
For setting up an eCommerce store, WordPress.org is the perfect choice because it’s free, gives you complete ownership of your website, and can easily integrate with third-party eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce.
Step 1: Choose a Domain Name and Hosting for Your Website
To create a WordPress site, you will first need to get a domain name and web hosting.
A domain name is basically your online store’s name on the internet. It is what customers will type to visit your website, like www.sellingfurniture.com or www.buyhomedecor.com.
Similarly, web hosting is where your website lives online. To find the right web hosting for your online store, you can see our complete list of the best WordPress hosting services.
You will notice that even though WordPress is free, buying web hosting and a domain name is where the costs can add up.
A domain name can cost you about $14.99/year, and hosting costs start from $7.99/month, which can be a bit expensive if you have a small budget or are just starting out.
Thankfully, Bluehost is offering a BIG discount to WPBeginner readers along with a free domain name and an SSL certificate.
Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress-recommended hosting partner.
To get a discount on Bluehost, just click on the button below.
This will direct you to the Bluehost website, where you can click on the ‘Get Started Now’ button.
You will now be directed to the Bluehost Pricing page, where you can pick a hosting plan.
The Basic and Choice Plus plans are the most popular web hosting plans among our readers, but you might prefer the Online Store plan.
To choose a plan, click on the ‘Select’ button under it. This will take you to a new screen where you have to pick a domain name for your online store.
Try to choose a domain name that’s easy to pronounce, spell, remember, and is related to your business.
If you are just starting your furniture business, then you can use our WPBeginner Free Business Name Generator to come up with your company’s name.
Then, the easiest option is to choose your furniture store’s name for your website. However, sometimes the domain name is already taken by some other business.
In that case, you can try adding some extra keywords or use your location to make your domain name stand out. For more ideas, you may want to see our beginner’s guide on how to choose the best domain name.
After choosing a name, just click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.
Once you do that, you will be asked to provide your account information, including your business email address, name, country, phone number, and more.
Upon providing those details, you will also see optional extras that you can buy.
We generally don’t recommend buying these extras straight away, as you can always add them later if your business needs them.
Next, simply type in your payment information to complete the purchase.
You will now get a confirmation email with details to log in to your Bluehost control panel. This will be your account dashboard where you will manage your furniture website, including asking for WordPress support.
Now, it’s time for you to install the WordPress software.
Step 2: Create a New WordPress Website
If you just signed up for Bluehost using our link above, then Bluehost will automatically install WordPress on your domain name for you.
However, if you want to create a different WordPress site, then you can also do that by clicking on the ‘My Sites’ tab in the Bluehost dashboard.
From here, simply click on the ‘Add Site’ button and select ‘Create New Site’.
The Bluehost wizard will now open up on your screen and walk you through the whole setup process.
First, you will need to type in a site title and an optional tagline for your website.
Once you do that, click the ‘Next’ button to continue.
You will now be asked to choose a domain name and path for your furniture website. If you already have a domain name, then go ahead and select it from the dropdown menu under the ‘Domain’ option.
However, if you haven’t purchased a domain name yet, then you can buy one by visiting the ‘Domains’ page on the Bluehost dashboard.
Upon selecting a domain name, simply leave the directory path blank and let Bluehost fill it in for you.
The setup wizard will also show you a number of plugins that you may want to install on your website, including OptinMonster and WPForms.
Many of these tools are must-have plugins that you will need to grow your online store. Simply check the boxes next to the ones you want to install on your site.
Once you are done, go ahead and click the ‘Next’ button to set up your furniture website. You will then see a ‘WordPress installed successfully’ message with information about your new website.
From here, click the ‘Log into WordPress’ button to access your admin dashboard.
You can also log in to the WordPress dashboard by going to yoursite.com/wp-admin/ in your web browser.
WordPress themes are professionally designed templates that control how your website looks on the front end to visitors.
Upon installing WordPress and visiting your website, you will notice that it has a default theme activated, which will look something like this:
However, if you want to get more sales and make a good impression on your customers, then you should replace the default theme with the one that matches your niche.
There are a lot of popular WordPress themes that you can customize on your website. You can also use multipurpose themes and create templates for your specific niche.
Additionally, you can also check our list of the best WooCommerce themes that will look amazing for your furniture store.
However, if you want a theme that is specifically designed for selling furniture online and requires minimal customization, then you can use SeedProd.
It is the best page builder plugin on the market that allows you to create landing pages and even an entire theme without using any code. It even comes with a furniture store template and additional WooCommerce blocks that will let you set up your furniture store in a few minutes.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button at the top.
If you have decided to use another theme for your furniture website, then you can see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress theme.
Upon installation, you will have to visit the Appearance » Customize page from the WordPress dashboard.
This will open the theme customizer, where you can change the theme settings according to your liking.
Alternatively, if you are using a block-based theme, then you will have to visit the Appearance » Editor page from the admin sidebar.
This will open the full site editor, where you will be using blocks to customize your whole theme.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.
Step 4: Create a Custom Home Page and Navigation Menu
WordPress uses two content types by default: posts and pages.
Pages can be used to create a home page, a Contact Us page, or an About Us page. On the other hand, posts are usually used to create articles and blog posts for your website.
These blogs are then displayed in reverse chronological order on your website’s home page.
If you want, then you can also start writing blog posts on your website to help promote your furniture business. This can also help you improve your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and customer engagement.
However, even if you plan to blog, you should create a separate page for your articles and not display them on your home page.
Instead, you can make a custom home page for your website that is visually appealing and introduces new visitors to your furniture store.
Once you have designed this page, you will have to set it as your home page.
To do this, visit the Settings » Reading page in your WordPress dashboard and choose the ‘A static page’ option in the ‘Your homepage displays’ section.
After that, open the ‘Homepage’ dropdown and choose the page you want to use.
By default, WordPress does not have any eCommerce-related features. If you want to sell furniture online, then you will need to use a plugin like WooCommerce.
First, you will need to install and activate the free WooCommerce plugin. For detailed instructions, you may want to see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, the WooCommerce setup wizard will open up on your screen. Here, you will first have to type in your physical store’s name.
After that, you will have to select an industry. Since you are going to be selling furniture, simply pick the ‘Home, furniture, and garden’ option from the dropdown menu.
Next, choose your store’s location and click the ‘Continue’ button.
WooCommerce will then show you a list of free features that you can use to boost sales on your website.
Here, simply check the features that you like and click the ‘Continue’ button.
That’s it. WooCommerce will now set up your online store for you.
Step 6: Set Up Shipping For Your Furniture
Now that your online store has been set up, it’s time to add a shipping method for your furniture.
To do this, visit the WooCommerce » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard and switch to the ‘Shipping tab.
Here, you will see that a shipping zone has already been added to the list. Simply click the ‘Edit’ link under the zone name to start configuring the settings.
This will take you to a new page where you can change the zone name to anything you like.
After that, you can start adding as many zone regions as you want from the dropdown menu. Here, you have to choose areas, cities, or countries where you want to deliver your furniture products.
Next, you have to add shipping methods. To do this, just click the ‘Add shipping method’ button.
This will open a prompt on the screen where you can select flat rate, free shipping, or local pickup as your method. You can also add all of them if you want.
Upon making your choice, simply click the ‘Add shipping method’ button.
WooCommerce will now add your chosen shipping method to the shipping zone.
To configure its settings, click the ‘Edit’ link under the method.
This will open another prompt on the screen where you can select the tax status and cost for the shipping.
Once you are done, go ahead and click the ‘Save changes’ button to store your settings.
This will take you back to the ‘Shipping Zone’ page, where you have to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button again to store your changes.
Step 7: Set Up Payments in Your Furniture Store
Next, you have to set up a payment method to accept online payments in your furniture store.
For this, you need to visit the WooCommerce » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard and switch to the ‘Payments’ tab.
This will open a list of different payment methods and payment gateways that you can use with WooCommerce. Here, click the ‘Finish set up’ button for the payment method that you want to enable.
Now, you will have to follow all of the on-screen instructions to set up the payment method of your choice.
Once you are done, click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Now, to activate the payment method in your furniture online store, simply toggle the ‘Enabled’ switch to active and click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom.
We recommend adding multiple payment methods to drive more sales. For example, you can use Venmo, add cash on delivery, accept credit cards on your website, and more.
Step 8: Add Your Furniture Products
Now, it’s time for you to start adding furniture products to your online store. With WooCommerce, you can import your products from a template, CSV file, or another service.
However, in this tutorial, we will show you how to manually add furniture products to your online store.
First, visit the Products » Add New page from the WordPress admin sidebar. Once you are there, you can start by adding a title for your furniture product.
Next, add some sentences describing the product in the ‘Product Description’ text box.
After that, you need to add a product image by clicking on the ‘Set product image’ link on the right. If you want to add multiple images, then you can click on the ‘Add product gallery images’ link instead.
This will launch the WordPress media library, where you can upload an existing image or add new ones from your computer.
Once you have done that, you can also add categories and tags for your product. This will help customers find your products in your online store.
To add a category, simply click on the ‘+ Add new category’ link and then make a new category for the furniture product that you are selling.
Next, type in the different tags that you want to use for the product under the ‘Product tags’ section.
Now, you need to scroll down to the ‘Product Data’ section and choose the ‘Variable product’ option from the dropdown menu at the top.
After that, switch to the ‘Inventory’ tab from the left column and add the stock-keeping unit (SKU) for your product.
Once you have done that, switch to the ‘Shipping’ tab from the left column. Here, you can add the weight, dimensions, and shipping class for your product.
Next, you need to switch to the ‘Attributes’ tab to create different attributes, including sizes, colors, and more for your products.
From here, you can add a name for your attribute under the ‘Name’ option and then add its values in the text box next to it.
For example, if your furniture product is available in three colors, then you can name the attribute ‘Available Colors’ and type black, white, and blue into the ‘Value’ box.
Once done, click the ‘Save Attribute’ button to store your settings.
After that, switch to the ‘Variations’ tab and click on the ‘Generate Variations’ button.
WooCommerce will now generate variations for all the attributes that you have created. To set up each variation, click on its ‘Edit’ link.
This will expand the tab for that specific variation, and you can now add its size, color, image, shipping method, and pricing.
Once you are done, click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Simply repeat this process to configure each product variation.
There are also other settings that you can explore and configure according to your liking. Once you are satisfied, click the ‘Publish’ button at the top to make your product live.
To add more furniture products to your online store, simply repeat the process all over again.
Step 9: Add a Contact Us Form
Once you have created a store to sell furniture online, it’s important to also add a contact form to your store.
This provides a convenient way for customers to get in touch with you and will help you improve the customer experience.
Plus, it can also help you build an email list by allowing you to capture email addresses from your customers and visitors to your store.
While you could also add a contact info widget or your business phone number to your website, a contact form is the best way to collect data, respond to customer queries, and generate leads.
We recommend using WPForms to add a form to your WordPress site. It is the best contact form plugin on the market that comes with 1000+ premade form templates.
Used by over 6 million websites, WPForms has a drag-and-drop builder, comes with a ready-made contact form template, protects your site from spam entries, and offers a free version.
All you have to do is use the WPForms ‘Simple Contact Form’ template and then add it to any page or post using the WPForms block.
It’s important to add a search block to your online store so that users can find your products.
However, the built-in WordPress search block is not very good and doesn’t look for matches in product attributes, reviews, custom fields, or product descriptions.
This is where SearchWP comes in. It is the best WordPress search plugin on the market that allows you to create a smart WooCommerce search without using any code.
It puts you in complete control of the search algorithm and looks at the product title, content (description), slug, and excerpt (short description) for matches.
You can even customize SearchWP settings to look for matches in taxonomies, comments, product tags, reviews, and more.
Step 11: Add Customer Reviews to Your Online Store
A great way to increase conversions in your furniture store is to showcase customer reviews on your website. This can help build trust among potential customers and convince them to buy furniture from your store
If you already have reviews for your products on Yelp, Facebook, or Google, then you can easily add them to your website using Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro plugin.
It is the best customer reviews plugin on the market that lets you collect and organize reviews into a nice layout.
Bonus: Use AIOSEO to Improve Online Store Rankings
Now that you have completed your online furniture store setup, it’s time to focus on your website SEO.
By optimizing your website, you can increase its search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your site. In turn, this can lead to more furniture sales in your online store.
It comes with a setup wizard that automatically helps you choose the best SEO settings for your business. Plus, it offers features like an on-page SEO checklist, XML sitemaps, a broken link checker, a schema generator, and more.
AIOSEO offers built-in WooCommerce SEO tools like dynamic optimizations, individual product page optimizations, breadcrumbs, product image SEO, and other handy features to bring more organic traffic to your online store.
It even lets you add GTIN, ISBN & MPN schema for your products to help you get rich snippets for your product listings in the search results.
We hope this article helped you learn how to easily sell furniture online. You may also want to see our ultimate SEO guide and our top picks for the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Are you looking to improve the customer experience in your online store?
When you take time to understand your customers’ needs, you can improve their journey from first discovering your site to making a purchase. By optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey, you can increase conversion rates, improve customer satisfaction, and boost profits.
In this article, we will show you how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store, from beginning to end.
What Is a WooCommerce Customer Journey?
‘Customer journey’ refers to a customer’s entire experience when they visit your WooCommerce store, including all of their interactions with your brand.
Optimizing the customer journey involves understanding each stage and ensuring that the customer has a seamless and enjoyable experience throughout.
These are the five stages of the WooCommerce customer journey:
Awareness stage: Make it easier for potential customers to find your online store and learn more about your business.
Consideration stage: Make it easier for your customers to find and learn about the products they need.
Decision stage: Optimize your checkout to encourage your customers to make a purchase.
Service stage: Improve your after-sales communications, express your appreciation for the sale, and better support your customers.
Loyalty stage: Build long-term relationships with customers through excellent customer service, personalized recommendations, and loyalty rewards.
In short, you should simply look at your online store from your customer’s point of view and then make it awesome.
How to Optimize the Customer Journey for Your WooCommerce Store (12 Tips)
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to optimize the customer journey for your WooCommerce store.
We will share actionable tips on how you can improve the customer journey at each stage. You can use the quick links below to jump to the different parts of our tutorial:
Here are some tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the awareness stage.
1. Understand How Your Customers Find You
The first thing you need is to see the journeys your users take before they make a purchase in your online store. This is where customer tracking can help.
The best way to set up WooCommerce customer tracking in Google Analytics is using MonsterInsights. It is the best analytics solution for WordPress and has a User Journey addon that can help you plan how to improve the user journey in your online store.
After that, you can see the path each customer took before buying your product. You get to view the pages they visited, where they clicked, and how much time they spent on a page.
This is really useful information to better understand your customers. You can see which product categories are performing the best and where customers are leaving your store during the purchase process.
It’s important to do search engine optimization (SEO) for your online store so that it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This will make it easier for potential customers to find you when searching for products and solutions that you offer.
Improving SEO involves writing SEO-friendly product titles and descriptions, using product categories and tags, adding alt text to product images, and much more.
We recommend using All in One SEO because it’s the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and is used by over 3 million websites. It will help you to optimize your entire store for SEO and get found by more customers.
Here are some tips for optimizing the customer journey in your WooCommerce store during the awareness stage.
3. Design an Eye-Catching Product Page
When a visitor clicks on a link to your website on Google or Facebook, you want to give a good first impression. You can do that by creating product pages and landing pages that are optimized for sales.
This is where SeedProd comes in. It is the best WordPress page builder on the market that allows you to easily create landing pages, sales pages, product pages, and even completely custom WordPress themes.
SeedProd comes with dozens of ready-made templates that are already optimized for higher conversions. Plus, it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that you can use to customize your landing pages.
SeedProd also includes a WooCommerce integration that allows you to add eCommerce elements to any page.
For example, you can display featured products that you want to upsell, product grids, add-to-cart buttons, and more.
You can also customize your WooCommerce product search results to help your customers find what they are looking for quickly and easily.
By default, WordPress and WooCommerce have a limited search function. That’s a problem because if your customers can’t find what they are looking for, then they may not come back to your online store.
We recommend using the SearchWP plugin. It’s the best custom search plugin for WordPress and is used by over 30,000 websites.
5. Keep Your Visitors Coming Back With Push Notifications
Push notifications are automated messages that show up in your customers’ browsers even after they have left your WooCommerce store.
You can use drip campaigns with multiple push notifications over time to promote products, build a relationship with your customers, increase sales, and get visitors to return to your store.
The easiest way to set up automated push notifications is with PushEngage. It’s the best web push notification software, and it is used to send over 15 billion push messages every month.
Customer reviews are a powerful form of social proof that can make your business seem more trustworthy and encourage people to buy from your online store.
But collecting, managing, and formatting customer reviews takes a lot of time and effort. That’s why we recommend using a customer review plugin to add different types of reviews to WordPress.
Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro allows you to show reviews from Yelp, Facebook, Google, and TripAdvisor. That way, you don’t need to install any extra plugins.
Next, you will want to help customers get through your checkout and buy your products. Here are our tips for optimizing the WooCommerce customer journey during the decision stage.
7. Improve Your Checkout
You can easily personalize the purchase experience in your WooCommerce store using FunnelKit, a WordPress sales funnel builder and optimization plugin.
For example, it comes with a One-click Upsells feature, which allows users to add products to their carts on their way to the checkout.
You can also add one-click order bumps to your checkout for increased conversions.
FunnelKit lets you customize the user journey with pre-checkout offers, custom checkout form layouts, beautiful templates, and more.
On average, 60 to 80% of people who add items to their cart don’t actually buy the products. This means that if you have an online store, then you are losing out on a lot of sales.
Often when a customer has added a product to their shopping cart, they will need some reassurance that they are making the right decision. This often leads to cart abandonment.
It allows you to create beautiful popups, countdown timers, slide-in forms, and more to nudge users in the right direction.
For example, OptinMonster can tell when a customer is about to leave your website and display a popup offering free shipping or a discount before they do.
You can learn how to grab your customers’ attention with targeted messages at just the right time in our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup.
Provide Great Customer Service
After customers have bought items from your WooCommerce store, you will want to give them great customer service to keep them coming back. Here are some tips for optimizing the service stage of the customer journey.
9. Follow Up With Your Customers
When running a WooCommerce store, your customers will receive different transactional emails. These emails help them get order confirmations, track their order statuses, get invoices, learn about how to return a product, and find more information about your online store.
By default, the design and layout of emails sent by WooCommerce are plain and generic. When you customize these emails, it helps to build trust with your customers, boost brand awareness, and get them to return to your store.
It includes a growing library of pre-built WooCommerce email templates that are proven to get results. And you can use the visual email automation builder to make any changes that you need.
What makes FunnelKit Automations really powerful is the custom goals-driven email automation builder. It shows you in-line analytics for each email.
For example, here is a screenshot of a workflow for sending out a thank you email after a customer’s first order.
As your online store grows, it’s important to provide good customer service. This leads to repeat sales, which means more profits for your business in the long run.
One way to do that is to add live chat to your website. This will let you interact with the people who visit your website, answer their questions, and solve their problems in real time. This can get you more sales and encourage existing customers to stay loyal to your brand.
The easiest way to add a live chat feature to your website is by using LiveChat Inc. It is one of the best live chat solutions for WordPress, and we use it on our own OptinMonster site.
The LiveChat WordPress plugin is free, although you will need to buy a paid subscription to the LiveChat service.
Another option is to automate live chat by using Chatbot.com, the best AI chatbot software for WordPress. You don’t need to do any coding or have any special technical skills to use it.
Finally, it’s important to turn your users into long-term and happy customers. Here are a few ways to optimize the WooCommerce customer journey for the loyalty stage.
11. Reward Loyal Customers
Creating a loyalty program can keep customers coming back to your online store and keep them away from your competitors. It can also be a great way to reward your best customers and make them feel valued.
You can give customers points for buying products and services, but also for creating an account, placing their first order, signing up for your email newsletter, and spending over a certain account.
It’s super easy to create a WooCommerce loyalty program using the Loyalty Program for WooCommerce plugin. It allows you to set up a loyalty program in just minutes and reward customers for buying products, leaving customer reviews, and more.
Adding gamification so that your customers are rewarded after they take certain actions on your website, like leaving a product review, posting a comment, or buying a product.
12. Automate Your Store and Focus on Your Customers
There’s a lot to keep track of when running an online store. Luckily, you can automate tasks to save time and money so you can focus on your customers while growing your business.
For example, you can use automation tools and plugins to send SMS messages to your customers, automate your payment processes, use social proof to increase conversions, automatically display your best product reviews, and much more.
Do you want to perform a User Experience (UX) audit of your WordPress website?
User experience is an important factor in the success of a website. A good user experience can lead to more conversions and sales, while a poor UX can cost you money.
In this article, we will show you how to easily do a UX audit of your WordPress website step-by-step.
Here is a quick overview of all the steps we will cover to perform a UX audit on your WordPress website:
User experience or UX describes the feelings and opinions that users have while using your website.
A pleasant user experience means users find your website easy to use and helpful.
By contrast, a poor user experience means users find your website difficult to use and can’t do what they want to do.
Creating a good user experience allows you to help users make the most out of your website. This eventually leads to conversions, sales, and business growth.
On the other hand, a negative user experience can cause visitors to leave your website without signing up or buying something in your online store. This causes you to lose potential sales and customers.
How to Perform a UX Audit of Your Website
As a business owner, you need to regularly check your website to make sure that it offers a good user experience.
This practice is called a UX audit. You can perform a UX audit by yourself using a combination of tools (you may already be using some of them).
During this process, you will look for issues that may negatively affect user experience on your website. When you find a problem, you can document it and then start fixing it.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Step 1: Define User Goals and Objectives
First, you need to put yourself into users’ shoes to understand what they are looking for when they reach your website.
For instance, if your website is an online store selling pet toys, your audience’s goal is likely to look at pet toys, read customer reviews for those products, and make a purchase.
Similarly, if you run a how-to blog, then your audience’s goal would be to read a tutorial and learn how to do something.
Understanding what your users want to achieve will allow you to help them better.
This exercise allows you to better understand users and their expectations of your website. Most importantly, it helps you figure out the goals and objectives of your target audience.
You can then analyze your website using these personas to see how quickly your content, products, and services can help those users.
Step 2: Test Your Website for Usability Issues
Testing your website for usability helps you quickly find problems that could destroy the user experience.
However, many issues often go unnoticed by website administrators until a user reports them. Users are more likely to switch to your competitor’s website than tell you about issues on your site.
Luckily, there are plenty of excellent tools that you can use to quickly detect potentially harmful usability issues on your website.
PageSpeed Insights (Free)
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool lets you quickly examine a URL for performance and usability issues.
It runs tests on your website and then presents the results for both mobile and desktop devices by assigning each one a score.
This score is given in four categories:
Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
It also tests for Core Web Vitals, which are a set of website performance metrics that Google considers essential to a website’s overall user experience.
When you run the test, the language may initially sound too technical. However, you will also find links to resources explaining these concepts in beginner-friendly terms with tips on resolving each issue.
Automated tools can help you catch many problems. However, they are not perfect and may not be able to identify many common UX problems.
If you have a small website, you can go to each page to manually review it yourself. However, it is impossible for most medium to large websites to do this manually.
So, how do you find pages with poor UX?
One easy way to find these pages is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market that allows you to see where your users are coming from and how they interact with your website.
Note: There is also a free version of MonsterInsights that you can try. However, we recommend upgrading to the paid version and unlocking the full potential of the plugin.
Upon activation, the plugin will run the setup wizard and help you connect WordPress with your Google Analytics account.
However, you will need to enable it for your website manually.
Start by visiting the Insights » Addons page in your WordPress admin dashboard to install and activate the eCommerce addon.
Next, you need to enable enhanced eCommerce tracking in your Google Analytics account. Go to your Google Analytics dashboard and select your website.
From here, click on the ‘Admin’ button in the bottom left corner.
On the next screen, you will see different Google Analytics settings.
Under the ‘View’ column, just click the ‘Ecommerce Settings’ link.
On the next screen, simply turn on the toggles next to the ‘Enable Ecommerce’ and ‘Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting’ options.
Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button when you are done.
Check Low Conversion Pages for UX Issues
Poor user experience is one of the main reasons for low conversions, abandoned carts, and high bounce rates.
You can view your conversion tracking reports in MonsterInsights to find pages with low conversions and higher bounce rates.
Simply go to the Insights » Reports page inside the WordPress admin area and then switch to the ‘eCommerce’ tab.
From here, you can see an overview of your top-performing products and conversion sources.
For advanced reports, you need to switch to your Google Analytics account and go to the Engagement » Pages and screens tab.
From here, you can sort the pages by conversion rate to see the pages with the least conversions.
Using Google Analytics, you can also track pages with the highest bounce rates, the least amount of time spent on them, and more.
For more conversion tracking options, you can see our complete guide on WordPress conversion tracking. It will also show you how to track form conversions, affiliate link conversions, and more.
Step 4: Ask For User Feedback
As you can see, many UX audit activities involve automated tools, analytics reports, and manual testing.
The entire point of the UX audit exercise is to improve user experience. So, why not just ask your users what they think?
Asking for user feedback can get you accurate input from real visitors about your website. It can help you find specific problems and fix them more easily.
Note: There is also a free plugin called UserFeedback Lite that you can try. We recommend upgrading to the Pro version to unlock the full potential of the plugin.
UserFeedback allows you to quickly run surveys and collect user feedback on your website. It also lets you show the surveys to the right users at the right time.
For example, you can show surveys to users on the pages with fewer conversions or display a feedback form to users on mobile devices.
Website speed is a major contributor to user experience. Slow sites cause poor UX and prevent users from moving forward and accessing your content.
The tools we mentioned earlier, like PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals, can help you evaluate the performance of your website.
However, if you are using MonsterInsights, then you can also run a website speed test inside your WordPress admin area.
Simply switch to the Insights » Reports page and then open the ‘Site Speed’ tab.
The report will run the same tests as PageSpeed Insights and show you a report. It will also give you practical tips to improve website performance.
Fixing Performance and Speed Issues
The easiest way to fix most performance issues is by simply installing a WordPress caching plugin.
We recommend using WP Rocket, which is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market. It lets you easily optimize your WordPress website without learning the technical stuff.
Upon activation, WP Rocket will start caching your website’s content.
Unlike other caching plugins that generate a cache when a user visits your website, WP Rocket automatically starts creating a cache in the background.
This means each new user on your website will see a cached version that loads much quicker and improves user experience.
You can learn more by reading our tutorial on setting up WP Rocket with more detailed instructions.
If caching doesn’t immediately fix your website speed, we recommend following our complete WordPress speed and performance guide. It includes step-by-step instructions on how to optimize your website speed.
Step 6: Evaluate Website Navigation
Users expect your site to have a navigation menu with the links they need to find the information they want.
Sometimes, a website may not have a navigation menu that helps users reach the page they want. This leads to a poor user experience, and visitors may leave and try some other website.
You need to make sure that your website has a straightforward navigation menu that takes users to the critical areas of your website.
Adding a search bar to your website’s header or navigation menu can also improve user experience. If users can’t find a link quickly, then they can try searching on your website.
However, the default WordPress search is not very good.
Instead, we recommend using SearchWP. It is the best WordPress search plugin on the market and quickly improves the search experience on your website.
SearchWP allows you to make everything on your website searchable, including custom fields, eCommerce attributes, custom tables, categories, tags, and more.
A lot of the time, poor user experience is caused at the end of a conversion path.
For instance, you might have users trying to submit your lead capture form, but something is stopping them from doing so.
Luckily, you can run split tests and manually test elements on your website to identify and fix problems.
Run A/B Split Tests to Figure Out UX Issues
An easy way to test your conversion elements is by running A/B split tests.
An A/B split test allows you to create two or more versions of a page with slight differences. It then shows users a different version randomly.
You can then compare the results to find out which variation of the page performed the best among your users.
The easiest way to run these tests on your WordPress website is by using Thrive Optimize. It lets you quickly create and run A/B tests on your WordPress website.
First, you will need to install and activate Thrive Optimize plugin. You can purchase the plugin with Thrive Architect or get it with Thrive Suite bundle.
Next, install and activate the Thrive Product Manager plugin on your website. You can download it from your Account Dashboard on the Thrive Themes website.
Upon activating the plugin, you need to go to the Product Manager page in the WordPress admin area.
Next, you need to check the ‘Install Product’ box under the Thrive Optimize and Thrive Architect products.
After that, click on the ‘Install Selected Products’ button to continue.
After installing the plugins, you will need to create or edit a post/ page and then click on the ‘Launch Thrive Architect’ button at the top.
This will show a popup where you can choose how to edit the page.
You can edit the page as a regular page using your theme template or as a landing page with a custom template.
If you choose a pre-built landing page, then you will be asked to choose a template.
Thrive Architect comes with dozens of beautiful templates for various niches to choose from.
After that, you will be able to edit your page in Thrive Architect’s page builder.
It is an intuitive design tool where you can point and click on any element to edit it or click on the ‘+’ button to insert new elements.
Once you have finished editing your page, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Work’ button to store your changes.
After that, click on the ‘A/B’ button in the right column to create a new A/B test.
To run your A/B test, you need to have at least two versions of a page.
On the next screen, click on the Add New Variation button to create a new version of your landing page.
It will now create a new variation, and you can start editing it using the Thrive Architect.
Make the changes to the page you think will work better than the previous version.
After that, simply click on the ‘Save Work’ button to store your changes, and then click on the ‘A/B’ button again.
You can choose how much traffic you want to send to each page variation and then click on the ‘Set Up & Start A/B Test’ button at the top.
This will bring up a popup where you can configure the A/B test settings.
You need to give your test a title and description. Afterward, you can turn on Automatic Winner settings and set minimum requirements for a variation to win.
Click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.
Finally, you will be asked to choose a goal for the test. For example, if it is a product page, then you may want to choose ‘Revenue’.
Finally, click on the ‘Start A/B Test’ button to finish the setup.
Thrive Optimize will now start showing the two variations of the page to your users and keep track of user interactions on the page.
You can view the test results anytime by visiting the Thrive Dashboard » Thrive Optimize page.
Once the test has run its duration, you can see which page has performed better for conversions or the goals you set during the test. You will then be able to make changes to improve the UX on your website.
A lot of time, you may not be able to run A/B split tests for all your pages. Luckily, there are other ways to test whether conversion elements on your pages are working.
Website owners are often just looking at the static representation of their website and not interacting with it like a real user would. That’s why many interactive failures go unnoticed for a long time.
This is when you will need to do some manual work. You can try to imitate a user journey as best as possible to complete a conversion.
For instance, if you run an eCommerce store, you can start from the page where your users usually land. Afterward, look at product pages, add items to the cart, and complete the checkout.
Within your UX audit, you must test all your forms, cart functionality, and checkout experience by interacting with those elements like a customer.
A user flow is a customer’s journey across your website. A user will usually take a predictable path to different areas of your website until they buy something or submit a form.
The best way to track user flows is by using MonsterInsights. It comes with a User Journey addon that allows you to see every step of a customer’s journey throughout your site, including the pages and products they looked at and how long they were there.
Note: You will need at least the Pro plan of the plugin to use the User Journey addon.
After setting up MonsterInsights, you need to go to the Insights » Addons page. From here, locate the User Journey addon and then install and activate it.
Now, MonsterInsights will show the user’s journey on individual orders. For example, in WooCommmerce, you can go to WooCommerce » Orders page and click on an individual order.
On the order details page, scroll down to the MonsterInsights User Journey section.
This will show you all the user interactions on your site with their times and durations.
If you are not using an eCommerce platform, then you can still track the user journey for your WordPress forms.
If you are using WPForms to capture leads, then it comes with user journey tracking that helps you track which path a user took to submit the form.
Like conversion elements, other areas of your website could disrupt user flow and block the path that leads them to become a customer.
You will need to manually evaluate user paths in Google Analytics to see where their journey abruptly ends. You can also simulate the user paths to see if you can come across a usability issue preventing the user from going forward.
Step 9: Evaluate Website Content Quality
Visual elements are not the only things that create a good or bad user experience.
Your website content plays a significant role in convincing users to stay on your WordPress blog or website and look around. It also helps search engines find your content more easily and send more visitors to your site.
We recommend performing a complete SEO audit of your website and optimizing your content for SEO.
All in One SEO comes with built-in SEO analysis, a headline analyzer, and site-wide SEO audit tools. All these features help you improve the quality and discoverability of your content.
You will also need to evaluate your content. For example, if a particular page is not ranking or converting well, then consider making it more comprehensive by adding more helpful content.
Don’t forget to check your content for spelling and grammar mistakes. They could make your website seem unprofessional and create a bad user experience.
We recommend using Grammarly. It is the best AI-powered writing tool that helps you automatically correct spelling and grammar mistakes.
Grammarly also has a free forever plan with spelling and grammar checks. However, we recommend buying a paid plan to unlock more powerful features.
Are you looking for a way to sell car parts online on your WordPress website?
If you have an automotive business, then a website is a great way to reach new customers. It can also improve the customer experience by allowing car owners to look through your entire catalog and order auto parts online.
In this article, we will show you how to sell car parts online with WordPress.
Which Is the Best Website Builder to Sell Car Parts Online?
There are many website builders that you can use to sell car parts online, but we recommend using WordPress.
According to our blogging research statistics, WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world. It powers nearly 43% of all websites, including many of the top eCommerce websites.
WordPress is also open-source and free, so you will have bigger profit margins. For more on this topic, see our article on why WordPress is free.
However, just be aware there are two types of WordPress software. First, there is WordPress.com, which is a blog hosting platform. Then, there is WordPress.org, which is also known as self-hosted WordPress.
For an eCommerce site, we recommend using WordPress.org because it gives you complete ownership of your website and online store. You can also install third-party plugins, including the popular WooCommerce eCommerce plugin.
According to our WordPress market share report, WooCommerce is used by 8.8% of all websites, which makes it more popular than Shopify for online stores and eCommerce sites.
To learn more about why we recommend WordPress to all our readers, please see our complete WordPress review.
We will now show you how to sell car parts online with WordPress. You can use the quick links below to jump to the different parts of the article:
To start selling car parts online, you will need a domain name and web hosting.
A domain name is your store’s address on the internet. This is what customers will type into their browsers to reach your website, such as www.carparts.com or www.buyautoparts.com.
Web hosting is where your site lives online. To help you find the right hosting for your business, we have created a complete list of the best WordPress hosting that you can buy.
Although the WordPress software is free, hosting and domain names are where the costs can really start to add up.
A domain name typically costs $14.99/year, and hosting costs start from $7.99/month. This can make it difficult if you are a new business or have a limited budget.
Thankfully, Bluehost is offering our readers 60% off web hosting, plus a free domain name. Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress-recommended hosting partner.
They are also offering our users a free SSL certificate. If you want to sell car parts online, then an SSL certificate is essential for keeping customer credit and debit card information safe.
You can click the button below to get started for as little as $2.75 per month.
Once on the Bluehost website, click the green ‘Get Started Now’ button.
This will bring you to the Bluehost pricing page, where you can choose a hosting plan for your auto part business.
We recommend choosing a Basic or Plus plan, as they are the most popular web hosting plans among our readers.
After selecting a plan, click on ‘Continue.’
On the next screen, you will need to choose a domain name.
Ideally, your domain name will be easy to pronounce, spell, remember, and relate to your business. The name of your auto parts business is a great place to start, but sometimes that domain may already be taken by another business website.
In that case, you can try extending the domain name by adding your location, what makes your auto parts business unique, or some extra keywords. If you need some inspiration, then check out our guide on how to choose the best domain name.
After choosing a name, click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.
Now you will need to provide your account information, such as your name and business email address. After that, you will also see optional extras that you can buy.
We generally don’t recommend buying these extras straight away, as you can always add them later if your business needs them.
After that, type in your payment information to complete the purchase.
After a few moments, you will get an email with instructions on how to log in to your web hosting control panel. This is your hosting account dashboard, where you can manage your car parts website, including setting up email notifications and asking for WordPress support.
It’s also where you will install the WordPress software, so let’s do that now.
Step 2: Create a New WordPress Website
If you sign up with Bluehost using our link, then Bluehost installs WordPress on your domain name automatically.
If you want to create a different WordPress website, then go ahead and click on the ‘My Sites’ tab in the Bluehost dashboard.
After that, you need to click on the ‘Add Site’ button and select ‘Create New Site.’
The Bluehost wizard will now walk you through the setup process.
First, you will need to type in a site title and an optional tagline.
When you are ready, just click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.
After that, Bluehost will ask you to choose a domain name and path for your car parts website. If you already own a domain name, then go ahead and select it from the dropdown menu.
If you don’t have a domain name, then you can buy one by visiting the ‘Domains’ page inside the Bluehost dashboard.
After choosing a domain name, you can leave the directory path blank and let Bluehost fill it in for you.
The installer will also show a few plugins that you may want to install on your car parts website, including WPForms. Many of these are must-have WordPress plugins that can help you grow your business and get more sales, so we recommend installing them.
When you are ready, click on the ‘Next’ button, and the installer will set up your car parts website. Once it’s finished, you will see a ‘WordPress installed successfully’ message with information about your new website.
You can now go ahead and click on the ‘Log into WordPress’ button, which takes you to your site’s admin dashboard.
You can also log in to the WordPress dashboard by going to yoursite.com/wp-admin/ in your web browser.
Your typical automotive website needs special features, like the ability to show listings, support for popular eCommerce plugins, and a VIN decoder tool.
It even has a template that’s designed specifically for the car industry.
Once you have chosen a theme, check out our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress theme. After installing your theme, you can customize it by going to Appearance » Customize in the WordPress dashboard.
This will open the theme customizer, where you can fine-tune the theme settings and see your changes instantly, thanks to the live preview.
If you are using one of the newer full site editing themes, then you can customize your theme by going to Appearance »Editor. This launches the full site editor, which uses blocks similar to the content editor.
Pro Tip: No matter which theme you are using, you can’t edit it by default using advanced drag and drop. For that reason, we recommend using a page builder like SeedProd instead.
Step 4: Create a Custom Home Page
WordPress has two default content types called posts and pages.
You will typically use posts to create articles and blogs. By default, the home page will show these posts in reverse chronological order, so the newest content appears at the top of the home page.
Blogging can help you build a stronger relationship with your customers, improve your WordPress SEO, and get more traffic to your automotive website.
For example, you might share tips on how to diagnose common car problems or blog about the latest industry trends.
However, even if you plan to blog, you typically don’t want to show those posts on your automotive website’s home page. Instead, we recommend creating a custom home page that introduces your car parts business to potential new customers.
Once you are happy with how the page looks, it’s time to set it as your home page. To do this, head over to Settings » Reading in the WordPress dashboard.
On this screen, you need to scroll to ‘Your homepage settings’ and select ‘A static page.’
With that done, just open the ‘Homepage’ dropdown and choose the page you want to use.
After that, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Save Changes.’ Now, if you visit your auto parts website, then you will see the new home page in action.
If you are going to write blogs, then you should also make sure to create a separate blog page to show your posts.
Step 5: Set Up an eCommerce Plugin
WordPress doesn’t have eCommerce features by default, so you will need a plugin to sell car parts online. The easiest way to sell physical products is by using WooCommerce.
First, you will need to install and activate the WooCommerce plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you will see the WooCommerce setup wizard. The first thing you will need to do is type in your store’s location.
After that, click on the ‘Continue’ button.
On the next screen, you can select your industry. Since you are going to sell car parts online, you will typically want to check the box next to ‘Other.’
After that, type your industry into the ‘Description’ field.
However, since you are selling automotive parts, make sure to check the ‘Physical products’ box.
When you are happy with the information you have entered, click on ‘Continue.’
With that done, you can choose how many products you plan to sell and whether you are currently selling anywhere else.
After entering this information, just click on the ‘Continue’ button.
The setup wizard will now recommend some business features that you can add to your online store. These features are free, so we recommend selecting the following checkbox ‘Add recommended business features to my site.’
When you are happy with the information you have entered, simply click on ‘Continue’ to set up your online store.
Step 6: Set Up Shipping for Your Car Parts
Next, you can add shipping options by going to WooCommerce »Settings.
Here, you need to click on the ‘Shipping’ tab.
With that done, select ‘Add shipping zone.’
On the next screen, type in a name for the zone and select one or more regions from the dropdown menu.
Once you have done that, simply click on the ‘Add shipping method’ button.
Now, you will see different shipping methods in the dropdown menu. You can choose between a flat rate, free shipping, or even offer local pickup.
Select your preferred shipping method and click ‘Add shipping method.’
WooCommerce will now add your chosen shipping method to the shipping zone.
To configure the shipping method, simply hover over it and then click the ‘Edit’ button.
You will see a popup with more settings you can use.
The settings will vary depending on the shipping method you choose. For example, if you select ‘Flat rate’, then you can change the method title, add a tax status, and enter the total shipping cost.
After entering this information, go ahead and click on ‘Save changes.’
You can create as many shipping zones as you want by repeating these steps.
Step 7: Set Up Payments for Your Car Parts Business
Next, you need to add payment options so that customers can buy your car parts online. To get started, head over to WooCommerce »Settings and select the ‘Payments’ tab.
To add more payment methods, simply follow the same process described above.
Step 8: Create Product Attributes and Attribute Terms
By default, WooCommerce creates each product as a ‘Simple Product.’ However, you will probably want to offer the same car part for multiple models or brands.
The easiest way to do this is by creating a variable product. This allows customers to visit a single product listing and then choose the right product variation for their car, as you can see in the following image.
To create variable products, you will first need to set up attributes and attribute terms.
For example, if you are selling tires, then you might make a ‘Season’ attribute and then add ‘Winter’ and ‘Summer’ as the attribute terms.
This will allow customers to choose between winter tires and summer tires.
You might also create a ‘Model’ attribute and then add each car model as an attribute term.
By adding attributes and attribute terms to your online store in advance, you will find it easier to create variable products later.
With that being said, head over to Products »Attributes. You can now type a title for the attribute into the ‘Title’ field. This will appear on your product pages, so make sure you use something descriptive.
When you are happy with the information you have entered, click on ‘Add attribute.’
This attribute will now appear towards the right of the screen.
Next, go ahead and click on the ‘Configure terms’ link.
This brings up a screen similar to the main attribute screen, where you can start adding attribute terms.
To start, type the term’s title into the ‘Name’ field.
When you are happy with the information you have typed in, just click on the ‘Add new…’ button.
Simply repeat the above steps to create more attribute terms. You can also create as many product attributes as you want and then add unique terms to those attributes.
Step 9: Add Your Car Part Products
After creating some product attributes and terms, you are ready to start adding car parts to your online store. You can add each product manually or import WooCommerce products from a template, CSV file, or another service.
In this guide, we will show you how to add car parts to your store manually, so start by going to Products » Add New.
On this screen, start by typing in the product name. This will appear at the top of the product page, so visitors will be able to see it.
After that, type in a description and add a product image.
After that, it’s a good idea to add categories and tags to the product. These will help customers find the right products on your car parts site, like categories and tags for WordPress pages.
Simply click on the ‘Add new category’ link and then create a new category for the car part you are adding.
After that, you can type each tag into the ‘Product tags’ box and click on ‘Add.’
To add multiple product categories and tags, simply repeat the same steps described above.
After that, scroll to the ‘Product Data’ box.
To create a variable product, simply click on the dropdown that shows ‘Simple product’ by default. Then, select ‘Variable product.’
You can now select the product type, add pricing, shipping costs, grouped products, and other information.
After entering all this information, you are ready to create variations by selecting the ‘Attributes’ tab. Here, open the ‘Add existing’ dropdown menu.
You can now go ahead and select the product attribute you want to use.
In the ‘Value(s)’ field, type in each term you want to use. When the right term appears, click to add it to the product.
With that done, click on the ‘Save attributes’ button.
To add more product attributes and terms, simply repeat the above steps.
With that done, click on the ‘Variations’ tab.
On this screen, go ahead and click on ‘Generate variations.’
WooCommerce will now create variations using all the attributes you added to the product.
To set up each variation, click on its ‘Edit’ link.
You can now add the variation’s price, upload an image, set the shipping options, and more using the settings in this section.
Simply repeat this process to configure each product variation.
There are lots more settings you can use to fine-tune the variable product. However, this is all you need to add a car part to your online store.
When you are ready to make the product live, go ahead and click on the ‘Publish’ button.
If you visit your online store, you will see the variable product live.
To add more car parts to your online store, simply repeat these steps.
Step 10: Add a Contact Us Form
Customers might sometimes need to talk to you directly. For example, they may want to find out when a particular part will be back in stock or get some advice on a mechanical problem.
While visitors could call your business phone number, it’s still a good idea to add a contact form to your website.
Most of the best contact form plugins come with built-in spam protection, so you won’t get any contact form spam. A form will also collect consistent information, so you will have all the data you need to write a helpful reply.
The easiest way to create a contact form is by using the free WPForms plugin. This plugin has a built-in Simply Contact Form template that you can quickly customize using the drag and drop editor.
After that, just add the form to any page, post, or widget-ready area using the ready-made WPForms block.
After adding some content to your car parts website, you will want to help visitors find their way around those pages and posts by adding a navigation menu.
No matter which theme you are using, it’s easy to add menus and sub-menus to your automotive website.
Step 12: Create a Smart WooCommerce Product Search
WooCommerce has a built-in search feature, but it’s not very good at finding products. It doesn’t look for matches in product attributes, reviews, custom fields, or product descriptions.
By replacing the default search with a smarter and faster search, you can help customers find the exact car parts they need. This will improve the customer experience and help you get more sales.
The easiest way to create a smart WooCommerce product search is by using SearchWP. SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin on the market and puts you in complete control of the WordPress search algorithm.
By default, SearchWP will look at the product title, content (description), slug, and excerpt (short description) for matches.
Plus, you can customize the SearchWP settings to look for matches in custom fields, taxonomies, customer reviews, product tags, and more.
Reviews are some of the best ways to earn customer trust and convince visitors to buy car parts from your website. After all, we are more likely to buy things that we see other people buying, using, or recommending.
If you already have reviews on platforms like Facebook, Yelp, and Google, then it’s easy to display them on your WordPress site using Smash Balloon Reviews Feed Pro.
It will collect reviews automatically and then organize them into a nice layout on your automotive website. You can also completely customize the review feed so that it perfectly fits with your site.
Is the WooCommerce product search not working in your online store?
If your WooCommerce search isn’t working correctly, users won’t be able to find the products they are looking for. This can result in a poor user experience, abandoned carts, and fewer sales.
In this article, we will show you what to do when the WooCommerce product search is not working. We will also explain how to improve the search feature.
The Importance of WooCommerce Product Search
Without a functional search tool, users won’t be able to browse through your product catalog and make purchases in your WooCommerce store.
This can result in frustrated customers leaving your site, which will skyrocket bounce rates and decrease profits.
In turn, it can also damage your store’s reputation. If many people struggle to use your online store, then they may go to your competitors instead.
The error may also cause your website SEO to suffer because search engines use the search functionality to rank websites.
If your site has lower rankings in the search results, then fewer customers will be able to find and purchase your products online.
By fixing the WooCommerce search feature, you can improve the customer experience, making it easier for shoppers to find what they are looking for and make more sales.
That being said, you can follow the steps in our troubleshooting guide and learn what to do when the WooCommerce product search is not working.
The most common reason the search feature isn’t working is because of your WordPress hosting.
The server hosting your site may not have enough resources to handle a large number of WooCommerce products at once.
This server may also have some software restrictions that limit the amount of available memory and prevent the search feature from working correctly.
If this is the case, then you can try contacting your hosting provider’s customer support, as this problem cannot be solved from your end. They can help you figure out if the WooCommerce search isn’t working due to the server and help you fix the issue.
However, if the issue is not with your hosting, then you will need to move on to the next step.
Step 2: Deactivate Plugins
The WooCommerce product search may not be working because of an outdated or new plugin on your WordPress website that is causing some errors.
This can happen if a plugin has bugs in its software or isn’t compatible with other plugins on your website.
You can easily fix this issue by deactivating every plugin apart from WooCoomerce on your site.
First, you will need to go to the Plugins » Installed Plugins page from the WordPress admin sidebar. Once you are there, just select all the activated plugins except WooCommerce from the list.
Next, simply choose the ‘Deactivate’ option from the ‘Bulk actions’ dropdown menu and click on the ‘Apply’ button to deactivate all the plugins on your site.
Now, you can visit your website to check if this has fixed the issue.
If it has, then simply activate the plugins one by one until you can find the one causing the error. You will then need to look for an alternative plugin or contact the developers for support.
If deactivating plugins didn’t fix the issue, then keep reading to solve the problem.
Step 3: Update the WooCommerce Database
A corrupted database can be another reason that the WooCommerce search is not working.
For instance, you may have imported a large number of products as a CSV file, which is causing a problem with the database.
First, head over to the WooCommerce » Status page from the WordPress sidebar.
Once you are there, simply switch to the ‘Tools’ tab and click the ‘Regenerate’ button next to the ‘Product lookup tables’ option.
After that, scroll down to the ‘Update database’ option and just click the button next to it.
This will update the WooCommerce plugin’s database to the latest version.
Next, simply visit your online store to check if the issue has been resolved.
Step 4: Check Catalog Visibility Settings
Another reason for this problem can be that you have set the catalog visibility of your products to ‘Shop only’ or ‘Hidden’.
With these settings, the products won’t show up in the search results in your online store.
To check this, you need to visit the Products » All Products page from the WordPress admin sidebar and click on the ‘Edit’ link under a product name.
Once you are on the product page, simply click the ‘Edit’ link under the ‘Catalog visibility’ option in the ‘Publish’ section on the right.
This will open up a list of visibility choices.
From here, you need to make sure that the catalog visibility is set to ‘Shop and search results’.
After that, click the ‘OK’ button to save your changes. Then, simply click the ‘Update’ button.
Now visit your website to check if the WooCommerce search is working. If it isn’t, then you will need to keep reading our tutorial.
Step 5: Reindex WooCommerce Products
You may not have indexed your Woocomerce products properly, making the search feature inaccessible.
To reindex the products, head to the Products » All Products page from the WordPress admin sidebar. From here, check the box at the top of the list to select all the products.
After that, select the ‘Edit’ option from the ‘Bulk actions’ dropdown menu and click the ‘Apply’ button.
This will open up the ‘Bulk Edit’ tab on the page.
From here, simply click the ‘Update’ button to reindex all the WooCommerce products.
Once you have done that, you need to visit your website to test the search results.
Improve WooCommerce Product Search With SearchWP
If you have tried all the steps above and they haven’t fixed the product search problem, then it’s time for you to switch to a search plugin.
It is the best WordPress search plugin on the market that can help you improve WooCommerce product search by automatically replacing the default WordPress search with a more powerful search feature.
It puts you in complete control of the WordPress search algorithm and builds an index that matches search keywords in content, titles, categories, tags, shortcodes, documents, products, and more.
Upon activation, head over to the SearchWP » Settings page from the admin sidebar and switch to the ‘General’ menu option.
Here, you have to copy and paste the license key into the ‘License Key’ field. You can get your key from the ‘SearchWP Accounts’ page on the SearchWP website.
After that, simply click the ‘Activate’ button.
Next, you have to visit the SearchWP » Extensions page from the admin sidebar.
From here, click the ‘Install’ button under the ‘WooCommerce Integration’ extension. Upon installation, the extension will be activated automatically.
Next, head over to the SearchWP » Algorithm page from the WordPress admin sidebar and click the ‘Source and Settings’ button.
This will open a popup where you need to check the ‘Products’ option to add WooCommerce products as a search source.
After that, click the ‘Done’ button to continue.
Now, if you scroll down, you will see a new ‘Products’ section added to the list of search sources.
By default, SearchWP will look at the product title, content (description), slug, and excerpt (short description) for search matches. You can add relevance (importance) to these search attributes by moving the sliders next to them.
Depending on how your site is set up, you may also be able to search for other content by clicking on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.
This will open up a popup from where you can add custom fields and taxonomies to the attributes as well.
Improve WooCommerce Product Search With Categories, Tags, SKUs, and Other Attributes
To make your WooCommerce product search more accurate, we recommend adding categories, tags, and SKUs as search sources using SearchWP.
Once the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ popup appears, simply start by typing ‘SKU’ into the ‘Custom Fields’ box. For more information, we recommend reading our guide on how to enable search by product SKU in WooCommerce.
After that, select the ‘Product categories’, ‘Product tags’, and other product attributes from the ‘Taxonomies’ dropdown menu.
Once you have done that, click the ‘Done’ button to save the changes.
Now that tags, SKUs, and categories have been added as search sources, move the slider next to these options to assign weight to these attributes.
After you have finished configuring settings for SearchWP, simply click the ‘Save’ button at the top.
Now the default search box on your WooCommerce store will be automatically replaced by SearchWP.
Finally, you can visit your website to check out the new and improved WooCommerce product search box.
We hope this article helped you learn what to do when the WooCommerce product search is not working. You may also want to see our article on how to fix WordPress search not working and check out our expert picks for the best WooCommerce plugins to grow your online store.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Do you want to learn how WordPress search works, and how you can make it better?
By understanding and improving the built-in WordPress search, you can help visitors find what they’re looking for. This can get you more conversions while keeping people on your site for longer.
In this article, we’ll look at how the default WordPress search works, and share tips on how to make it better.
How Does WordPress Search Work?
WordPress comes with a search system that will look for content within your website.
How the search bar looks and where it appears will vary depending on your WordPress theme, but most themes show the search bar in the top right corner.
Note: If your theme doesn’t show the WordPress search bar by default, then skip ahead to our FAQs, where we’ll show you how to add it.
Visitors can type a search query into this field, and WordPress will search:
As you can see, it doesn’t search widgets, user comments, categories, tags, WooCommerce products, or PDF documents. It also doesn’t search image gallery titles, captions, or alt text, although you can search this content using a search engine plugin like SearchWP.
WordPress performs this search using the WP_Query class. It will start by displaying any posts that have the search term in the post title, arranged in reverse-chronological order, meaning that the newest entries will be displayed at the top of the results.
After that, it’ll show any posts that have the matching term in the post content.
For example, imagine you’ve just published a post about cats titled ‘My Favorite Pet’, and you also have an older post titled ‘Best Cat Photos.’ In this case, searching for ‘Cat’ will display the older ‘Best Cat Photos’ post first, since it has the search term in the title.
This may not a problem for WordPress blogs or websites that only have small amounts of content. However, this ordering logic will often show inaccurate or confusing results for bigger blogs, online stores, or business websites.
The built-in system is also missing some of the features that people expect from modern search engines. This includes autocomplete, live Ajax search, filtering, and spellcheck.
Why Improve the Default WordPress Search?
An advanced, fast, and accurate on-site search can help visitors find interesting and relevant content, which will keep them on your website for longer. This can increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate in WordPress.
Since visitors are spending more time on your site, this will send positive signals to the search engines. This can improve your WordPress SEO, which means search engines like Google will show your content to more people and drive more visitors to your website.
People who are using your site’s internal search are already highly engaged. They’re actively looking for specific content, which may mean they’re ready to take actions such as buying a product, signing up to your WordPress membership site, or booking an appointment.
If these people can’t find what they’re looking for, they may give up and go to a different website. This means you’re losing out on visitors who were ready to convert.
A search results page is also an example of personalized content since you’re showing the visitor results that match their unique search query. By providing personalized content that’s accurate and helpful, you can improve the visitor experience. Once again, this can encourage them to convert.
Performance is another reason why it’s a good idea to replace the default WordPress search with a better alternative.
The larger your WordPress website gets, the longer it’ll take WP_Query to scan your database and get the results. This means your site’s search will get slower, as your website gets bigger.
How to Make the WordPress Native Search Better
On-site search helps visitors find what they’re looking for, including products to buy and interesting blogs to read. Since it’s such an important part of your site, it’s a bad idea to rely on the limited built-in WordPress search.
With that being said, let’s see how you can improve the native WordPress search.
Show Instant Results With Live Ajax Search
Live Ajax search adds a dropdown and autocomplete feature that’s common in search engines like Google.
As the user types, live search guesses what they want to search for and then shows them results without even reloading the page.
This can help visitors find the right content, without having to manually press the ‘Search’ button or wait for the page to reload.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, the default WordPress search form will automatically use the Ajax live search feature. If you visit your site and start typing into the search bar, then you’ll see the instant search in action.
Change the Default Search URL Slug
By default, WordPress search URLs typically look something like this:
http://example.com/?s=search-term
The extra ?s= characters make this URL more difficult to read and understand, which can confuse visitors who are trying to find their way around your site.
Even worse, these URLs aren’t optimized for search engines which can stop them from correctly indexing your site’s contents.
You can go ahead and use the following custom code to replace the ‘/?s=search-term’ characters with ‘search.’ Your slug will look something like this when finished: http://example.com/search/wordpress
To use something other than ‘search’ in your URL, simply customize the code snippet below.
By uploading PDFs to your WordPress website, you can share information about your services and products in a format that works on all devices. They’re also perfect for offering your visitors ebooks, user manuals, menus, and more.
However, WordPress only searches the contents of its database by default, so it will only look at the title and description of your PDF files, and not their contents. As a result, your visitors may struggle to find the best PDF for their search query.
The good news is that you can use a custom search plugin to improve the default WordPress search experience. If your PDFs are unencrypted, then the right search plugin will index the contents and metadata of your PDFs and add them to the search results.
If you have multiple categories of content on your website, then you might want to let users restrict their search to a specific category. This can help visitors find the right content, faster.
For example, if you have an online store then it often makes sense to let customers search within a particular product category.
If you run a membership site, then you might use search by category to help visitors find other members, groups, forums, online courses, and other specific kinds of content. For more information, please see our guide on how to add search by category in WordPress.
Make a Smart WooCommerce Product Search
WooCommerce has its own built-in search, but it doesn’t look for matches in product attributes, reviews, or product descriptions. This omission can stop shoppers from finding products they want to buy on your online store, so you get fewer sales.
To get even more sales, you may want to fine-tune the kind of products WooCommerce includes in its search results. For example, you might only show products that are on sale or come with free shipping.
Custom post types allow you to go beyond posts and pages and create different content types for your website. Custom post types can have different custom fields and their own custom category structure.
For example, if you run a movie review website, then you would probably want to create a ‘movie reviews’ post type that has fields for the director, release date, and more.
At WPBeginner, we use custom post types for our Glossary section to keep it separate from our blog posts.
If you use custom post types, then you may want to create a form that allows visitors to search only that content.
For example, we also have a form that only searches WPBeginner’s coupon codes.
By default, the built-in WordPress search will include all posts and pages in its search results.
However, you may want to exclude certain pages and posts from the search results. For example, if you’re running a WordPress membership website or selling online courses, then you’ll typically want to exclude your premium content from public search results.
If you’re running an online store, then you may want to hide content like your account page, checkout page, and thank you page. To help you out, we’ve created a guide on how to exclude pages from the WordPress search results.
In this guide, we’ve explored how the default WordPress search works and shared lots of tips on how to improve it.
However, you may still have some questions about this important feature. That said, here are some of the most frequently asked questions about WordPress search.
How Do I Improve WordPress Search?
The best way to improve the built-in WordPress search is by using SearchWP.
SearchWP is the best custom search plugin for WordPress and allows visitors to search any content on your site including documents, WooCommerce products, custom fields, tags, comments, and more.
It also lets you customize the WordPress search algorithm, so you can control exactly where the content appears in the search results.
Since the main navigation menu typically appears across your entire site, visitors will be able to search for pages, posts, products, and more, from any page of your website.
If you’re using a block-based theme such as ThemeIsle’s Hestia Pro or Twenty Twenty-Three, then you can add a search bar to your theme using the full-site editor (FSE).
To do this, go to Appearance »Editor in the WordPress dashboard.
By default, the editor will show your theme’s home template. If you want to add the search bar to a different template, then click on the small arrow icon in the toolbar.
Then, select ‘Browse all templates.’
You’ll now see all the templates that make up your WordPress theme. Simply find the template where you want to add the search bar, and then click on its title.
You will now see this template in the full-site editor.
To go ahead and add a search bar, click on the blue ‘+’ icon.
In the popup that appears, type in ‘Search’ to find the right block.
You can then drag the block to the location where you want to show the search bar.
To customize the block title or placeholder text, simply type it into the search block where it says ‘search’ or ‘optional placeholder.’
When you’re happy with how the block looks, click on ‘Save’ to make the search bar live.
How Do I Add Search to a WordPress Page or Post?
You can add a search bar to a specific page or post using the built-in Search block.
This is a good choice if you want to control exactly where the search bar appears on every page and post, or you only need to offer search on specific areas of your website.
To get started, simply open the page where you want to add a search form and then click on the + icon.
In the popup that appears, type ‘Search’ to find the right block. Once you click on the Search block, it will add the block to your page.
By default, the block uses ‘Search’ for both its label and the button text.
This will be visible to visitors, so you may want to replace it with something more descriptive by typing into the text fields.
You can also add some placeholder text to the search bar. This text will disappear automatically when the visitor starts typing.
To add a placeholder, simply click on ‘Optional placeholder…’ and then start typing.
When you’re happy with how the Search block looks, you can go ahead and either publish or update the post.
Do you want to add fuzzy search to your WordPress website?
WordPress fuzzy search helps users easily find the information they are looking for, even if they misspell or incorrectly enter their query. This improves the overall search experience and user engagement on your website.
In this article, we will show you how to easily add fuzzy search to your WordPress website.
What Is Fuzzy Search for WordPress?
Fuzzy search looks for partial matches for a search term, and if no exact matches are available, then it shows users the closest results.
This way, users can find the right content on your website even if they make typos in their search queries.
By default, all WordPress websites come with a basic search feature that only shows results for exact matches.
For instance, if a user misspells a term, no results will be shown, not even partial matches. This creates a bad search experience for users and often causes them to leave your site. You can see this in the image below.
This is where SearchWP comes in. It is the best WordPress search plugin on the market that automatically replaces the default search with a much better search feature.
Unlike the default WordPress search, SearchWP can use fuzzy search and look for matches in titles, excerpts, post or page content, products, custom fields, categories, tags, PDFs, and more.
For instance, if a user searches for ‘vintage furniture’ on your WordPress blog but misspells a word, then they will still be able to find your posts on this topic.
The image below shows the same misspelled search using the SearchWP plugin.
Note: We only recommend adding fuzzy search if you really consider it necessary. This is because partial matches can reduce the effectiveness of the search form on your website and display unwanted results, leading to user frustration.
That being said, let’s see how you can easily add fuzzy search to your WordPress website.
Upon activation, you need to visit the SearchWP » Settings page from the admin sidebar and then enter your license key into the required field. After that, click the ‘Activate’ button.
You can find the license key information in your account on the SearchWP website.
Now, the fuzzy search feature is not enabled in SearchWP by default.
However, you can easily turn it on by visiting the SearchWP » Settings page from the WordPress dashboard and scrolling down to the ‘General’ tab.
From here, simply toggle the switch next to the ‘Partial Matches’ option.
Doing so will enable the WordPress fuzzy search feature for your site, and your settings will be saved automatically.
Once that is done, you should review the other SearchWP settings. The plugin comes with a bunch of powerful options that allow you to customize search on your WordPress blog.
You can see them by going to SearchWP » Algorithm from the WordPress admin sidebar.
From here, you can assign weight to different search results. This tells SearchWP to consider some attributes as more important when displaying its search results.
You can also click on the ‘Sources & Settings’ button to select additional search areas. For instance, you can enable search for comments, products, and more instead of simply posts and pages.
SearchWP automatically replaces the default WordPress search. This means that if you have already added the WordPress Search block or widget to your website, then it will start using the SearchWP custom algorithm for results.
However, if you have not added a search form to your website yet, then you can do so by simply inserting the Search block or widget into any post, page, or sidebar area.
Head over tothe Appearance » Widgets page from the WordPress dashboard.
Here, click the add block ‘+’ button to find the Search block and add it to your sidebar. Then, don’t forget to click on the ‘Update’ button to store your settings.
However, if you are using a block theme, then it may not have a widget-ready area. In that case, you won’t see the Widgets screen under the Appearance menu.
Instead, you can use the full site editor to add the search block to your website. Simply go to the Appearance » Editor page to launch the editor.
Here, click the ‘+’ button and add the Search block to where you want to display the search form on your website.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Update’ button to save your settings.
You can now visit your website and try out the new, more powerful search feature.
For example, you can see in the image below how the fuzzy search feature returns multiple relevant results from a misspelled query.
Bonus: Search by Category in WordPress to Improve User Experience
By adding fuzzy search, you make it easier for users to find relevant content, which makes your website more user-friendly and helpful for visitors.
Another way to make your website easier to navigate is by allowing users to search by category in WordPress.
Categories allow you to organize the content on your website in a more structured way. If you have a lot of blog posts on your site, then allowing users to search by category makes it easier for them to search within specific topic areas, such as travel.
If you have an online store, then adding a category search for products also makes it easier for customers to find the items they are interested in buying. In turn, this can help increase sales.
You can easily improve user experience by enabling the category search feature using the SearchWP plugin. This creates an interactive form where users can filter results using the different categories on your site.
Vlogging is a powerful way to connect with people and build a personal brand. However, if you simply upload vlogs to third-party platforms like YouTube, then you may struggle to grow your audience, make money, and become a successful vlogger.
In this article, we will show you how you can start a vlog and make money.
Which Is the Best Website Builder for Your Video Blog?
There are many website builders that can help you create a vlog site, but we recommend using WordPress and a separate video hosting platform.
To learn more about why WordPress is such a good choice, please see our complete WordPress review with pros and cons.
There are two types of WordPress software: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. We recommend using WordPress.org, also called ‘self-hosted WordPress.’ This will give you full ownership and control of your site.
Using WordPress.org allows you to install third-party plugins and themes, including plenty that are designed specifically for vloggers.
Also, while you can upload videos to WordPress, it’s far better to use a separate video hosting platform such as YouTube or Vimeo.
Videos take up a lot of your hosting resources, which will slow down your website. Instead, we recommend uploading your vlogs to a separate hosting platform such as YouTube or Vimeo, which has all the server resources you need.
After uploading your vlogs to one of these sites, you can then embed your vlog in a WordPress page or post by simply copying and pasting a link. WordPress has built-in support for most major video hosting platforms.
If you really want to save time and impress your viewers, then you can use a plugin like Smash Balloon to create a video feed that will update automatically every time you post a new vlog.
If you don’t already have a video hosting platform in mind, then don’t worry. Later in this guide, we’ll help you find the perfect platform for your vlogs.
Step 1. Setting Up Your Video Blog Website
To create a video vlog, you’ll need a domain name and web hosting.
Although the WordPress software is free, hosting and domain names are where the costs can really start to add up.
A domain name typically costs $14.99/year and hosting costs start from $7.99/month. This is a lot for hobby vloggers, new creators, or anyone who is working with a tighter budget.
Thankfully, Bluehost has agreed to offer our users over 60% off on web hosting and a free SSL certificate as part of this deal. This is absolutely essential if you plan to sell premium videos and make money from your vlogs. You will also get a free domain name when you sign up!
Simply click the link below to create a vlogging website for as little as $2.75 per month.
Because you get a free domain when you sign up with Bluehost, you’ll need to be sure it’s the right fit for your video blog. For expert tips, check out our guide on how to choose the best domain name.
Once you’ve completed the purchase, you’ll get an email with instructions on how to log in to your web hosting control panel. This is your hosting account dashboard where you can manage your vlog, including setting up email notifications and asking for WordPress support if you need it.
It’s also where you’ll install the WordPress software, so let’s do that now.
Step 2. Install WordPress on Your Video Blog
When you sign up with Bluehost using our link, you’ll get access to a one-click WordPress installer. Simply log into your Bluehost account and click on ‘One Click Install.’
You can now follow the onscreen instructions to set up WordPress.
Once WordPress is set up, you’re ready to start customizing your vlog site.
Step 3. Select a Video Theme
WordPress themes are professionally designed templates that change how your vlog looks and acts.
There are lots of different premium and free WordPress business themes to choose from. You can generally categorize these as multipurpose WordPress themes, or niche industry themes. However, most WordPress themes are designed to show text.
Since we’re starting a vlog, we need a theme that’s designed specifically for videos.
Even if you’re using a separate video hosting platform, embedded videos still take time to load. With that in mind, it’s important to find a lightweight theme that won’t slow down your website. Wherever possible, we also recommend using a theme that has built-in lazy loading.
On top of that, vlogs often need special features such as parallax scrolling, lightbox popups, and fullscreen video backgrounds.
That’s a lot to keep in mind, so you may want to look at our expert pick of the best WordPress video themes.
After installing a theme, you may want to customize it by going to Appearance » Customize in the WordPress dashboard. This will launch the theme customizer where you can fine-tune the theme settings and see your changes in the live preview.
If you’re using one of the newer full-site editing themes, then you’ll need to go to Appearance » Editor instead.
Here, you can fine-tune the theme using blocks.
Just remember that you can customize your theme at any point. You can even completely change your WordPress theme, if you realize it doesn’t quite meet your needs.
This means you don’t need to finalize your site design now. In fact, it may be easier to fine-tune your vlog once you’ve added some content.
Step 4. Create a Custom Homepage
WordPress comes with two content types called posts and pages.
You’ll typically use posts to create articles and blogs, while pages are static “one-off” types of content. For example, you might publish an about page, a privacy policy, or a custom archive page.
There are a few different ways to show videos in WordPress. However, since we’re creating a video vlog you’ll typically embed one or more videos in a blog post.
By default, the WordPress homepage shows your posts in reverse chronological order, so your latest vlog appears at the top of the homepage.
However, you may want to move this blog list to another page, and use a custom homepage instead. This custom homepage can introduce your vlog to visitors and let them know what you have to offer.
You might even create a YouTube gallery of all your best videos, which is a great way to catch a visitor’s attention and make them want to watch more of your content.
Smash Balloon allows you to create all kinds of galleries, including showing a specific YouTube playlist or favorites feed, a single video, or even your latest live stream.
Once you’re happy with the design, it’s time to set it as your homepage. To do this, go to Settings » Reading in the WordPress dashboard.
Here, scroll to ‘Your homepage settings’ and select ‘A static page.’
Next, open the ‘Homepage’ dropdown and choose the page that you want to use.
After that, simply scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Save Changes.’ Now, if you visit your website you’ll see the new homepage in action.
With that done, make sure you create a separate blog page to display your vlogs.
Step 5. Set Up Your Video Hosting Platform
Before you can start adding videos to your WordPress website, you’ll need to upload them to a separate video hosting platform. In this way, you can show countless high-resolution videos on your website without affecting its performance.
There are lots of different video hosting platforms that you can use, but we recommend YouTube as it’s the most popular choice.
It’s free to create a YouTube account and you can upload as many videos as you want.
YouTube even has a Partners Program that you can join to make money from your videos. This program also offers more benefits like analytics, longer videos, and editing tools.
If you don’t want to use YouTube, then there are many other popular platforms including Vidyard, Wistia, and SproutVideo. For a closer look at all the top video sites, please see our expert pick of the best video hosting sites for bloggers.
After choosing a platform, you’ll need to create an account and upload all the vlogs that you want to show on your WordPress website.
For instructions on how to do this, check out the online documentation for your chosen video hosting platform.
Step 6. Create Your First Vlog
To create your first vlog, simply go to Posts » Add New in your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress has a block-based editor that allows you to create beautiful content layouts for your vlogs. Here, you can add text, images, audio clips, and more.
The easiest way to add vlogs to WordPress is by using the built-in auto-embed feature. If you’re using one of the big video hosting platforms, then you can simply paste the video’s URL into the WordPress content editor, and WordPress will handle the rest.
Just head over to your chosen video hosting platform and find the vlog that you want to show on your WordPress blog. You can then simply copy the video’s URL.
After that, switch back to the WordPress dashboard and paste the URL in the content area. If you paste it into a standard Paragraph block, WordPress will automatically try to place it in the correct block, such as the YouTube block.
Even if you don’t see the platform-specific block, it will use the Embed block and display the video inside the content editor.
As you’re working on the vlog, you can see how it’ll look to visitors by clicking on ‘Preview.’
This will open the page in a new tab.
The WordPress post editor also has sections for Categories and Tags. You can use these to organize your vlogs so it’s easier for visitors to find interesting content. To learn more, please see our guide on how to add categories and tags in WordPress.
When you’re happy with how the vlog looks, go ahead and click on the ‘Publish’ button in the top-right corner of the screen.
To add more vlogs to your website, simply follow the same process described above.
Step 7. Add a Contact Form to Your Vlog
Some viewers might want to contact you directly. This may include affiliate marketers, sponsors, advertisers, and other brands who are looking to build relationships with creators, or other vloggers who want to collaborate.
These people could ring your phone number or send a message to your business email address, but we always recommend adding a contact form to your website.
This makes it easier for potential partners to contact you, so you don’t miss out on any opportunities to grow your brand and make money from your vlogs.
The easiest way to add a contact form to your WordPress website is by using the free WPForms plugin. WPForms comes with a built-in Simple Contact Form template that you can customize using the drag-and-drop editor.
You can then add the form to any page, post, or widget-ready area using the ready-made WPForms block.
Once you’ve added some content to your vlog, it’s a good idea to add a navigation menu so visitors can find their way around the different videos.
The exact location of your menu will depend on your WordPress theme. Most themes have several options, so you can create multiple menus and then show them on different areas of your vlog.
Whether you create a single menu or multiple menus, it’s easy to add navigation to your vlog. For a complete guide, please see our post on how to add a navigation menu.
Menus encourage people to explore your site, but sometimes visitors may want to search for a specific vlog. WordPress comes with a built-in search feature, but it’s quite basic and not very good at finding relevant content.
It is very easy to use and gives much more accurate search results. It allows visitors to search for a keyword in the post or page title, content, URL slug, categories, tags, taxonomies, WordPress excerpts, and even comments.
All of this can help visitors find interesting vlogs, fast.
If you want to get more viewers, then you’ll need to optimize your vlog for SEO. This will help search engines understand your content and show it to people who are looking for videos just like yours.
AIOSEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and has everything you need to get your vlogs onto the first page of Google, without having to learn any complicated SEO jargon.
AIOSEO comes with the easiest setup wizard that helps you choose the best SEO settings for your business. AIOSEO will even scan your vlogs and show an actionable checklist on how you can optimize that specific vlog.
Additionally, AIOSEO has a video sitemap feature that you can use to show search engines what’s the most important content to index.
Did you know that 70% of people who leave your site will never come back? Thankfully there are lots of ways to turn abandoning visitors into loyal viewers.
To start, it’s smart to create an email newsletter so people who enjoy your vlogs can subscribe. After that, you can email these subscribers every time you post a new vlog.
You can also keep them engaged with your brand by sending them fun surveys and polls, notifying them about any giveaways and contests you’re running, or even simply asking them for feedback on your latest vlog.
All of this can help you create a sense of community and build a stronger relationship with your viewers.
If you do build an email list, then you’ll want to make sure your messages arrive safely in the subscriber’s inbox and not in their spam folder. With that in mind, we recommend using an SMTP service provider to improve your email deliverability rates.
Another option is to use push notifications with software like PushEngage to send targeted, personalized messages to viewers after they leave your vlog.
Push notifications are short, clickable notifications that appear as a popup on the user’s desktop or mobile devices. Some of the biggest websites in the world use push notifications to keep users engaged, including Facebook.
These notifications go directly to the user’s web browser or mobile device so they have a high chance of getting the person’s attention, which makes them perfect for notifying viewers when you post a new vlog.
Creating lots of quality, engaging vlogs takes a lot of time and effort, so you may want to make money from your videos.
If you’ve created a contact form, then potential sponsors and partners already have a way to contact you, which is a great start. However, there are lots more ways to make money online with WordPress.
Here are some of the best ways to make money from your vlog.
Google AdSense
There are many reasons why it’s smart to embed videos on your own website, rather than simply uploading them to platforms like YouTube.
One major benefit is that you can show Google AdSense ads next to your videos.
When you sign up for Google AdSense, Google acts as a middleman between you and the advertiser. Instead of you having to find the right partners for your vlog, Google allows advertisers to bid for keywords matching your content. This allows you to get the best possible rates for the ads on your vlogging website.
Many vloggers make money by recommending products and services to their viewers. For example, many lifestyle vloggers film daily routine videos showing off their favorite skincare or fitness products.
By using affiliate links, you can earn money every time a viewer buys a product or service based on your recommendation.
For the best results, it’s a good idea to only recommend quality items that you already use and trust. If you encourage viewers to buy poor-quality or scammy products, then you’ll damage your band and almost certainly lose viewers.
If you build a strong, positive relationship with your viewers then they may want to support your work as a vlogger. This is particularly true if you’re a hobby vlogger or someone who is just starting out.
Although they’re mostly used by non-profits, some vloggers use donation forms so that viewers can support their work. These forms are often presented as ‘buy me a coffee’ or ‘buy me a beer.’
Most of the time, you’ll want your vlogs to be publicly available so you can get as many views as possible and build your audience.
However, some vloggers may want to create a video membership site in WordPress. This allows people to pay for different perks, such as early access to the latest vlogs, exclusive live streams, or premium members-only videos.
You can also offer perks that don’t involve videos, such as a members-only forum, blog posts, or the ability to chat with you directly on channels like Discord.
The easiest way to create a membership site is by using MemberPress. It is the best WordPress membership plugin on the market and allows you to accept payments, create unlimited subscription levels, restrict access to video pages based on levels, and more.
Sell Your Videos as Digital Downloads
Depending on the kind of vlogs you create, you may decide to sell some of your premium videos as digital downloads. For example, if you’re a health and fitness vlogger then you might create videos teaching your followers different exercise routines.
For some niches, this can be a way to monetize the audience you’ve built from your vlogs.
With Easy Digital Downloads, you have complete control over how you distribute your videos. You can allow customers to download files as many times as they want or restrict file downloads by time or attempt.
Would you like your customers to be able to search for your WooCommerce products using a SKU code?
Because SKU codes uniquely identify your products, searching for them will help users quickly find exactly what they are looking for. The challenge is that SKU search is not enabled in WooCommerce by default.
In this article, we’ll show you how to enable search by product SKU in WooCommerce.
Why Enable Search by Product SKU in WooCommerce?
To run a successful WooCommerce store, it’s important for your customers to easily find the products they wish to purchase. To make this simple, most eCommerce platforms use SKUs, or Stock Keeping Units, to uniquely identify each product.
If a customer knows the SKU for the product they wish to purchase, why not let them search for the SKU to instantly find the correct product in your store?
The problem is that WooCommerce SKUs are stored in custom fields, and these are not indexed or included in search results by default. As a result, searching for the SKU won’t help.
Let’s take a look at how to solve this problem by enabling users to search by SKU in WooCommerce using a product search plugin.
How to Enable Search by Product SKU in WooCommerce
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the SearchWP plugin. You’ll need at least the Pro plan to access WooCommerce integration. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
SearchWP is the best custom search plugin for WordPress and is used by over 30,000 websites. It lets you customize the search algorithm, add live Ajax search for real-time results, and more.
Upon activation, you need to visit the SearchWP » Settings page and switch to the ‘Support’ tab to enter your license key. You can find it in your downloads area for your account on the SearchWP site.
Next, you need to install and activate the WooCommerce Integration extension for SearchWP.
You’ll find this in the downloads area for your account on the SearchWP website, too. You should install it as you would install any other WordPress plugin.
Now you are ready to customize the SearchWP search engine to index your product SKUs.
Simply go to the SearchWP » Settings page and make sure you’re on the ‘Engines’ tab. Once there, you need to click the ‘Sources & Settings’ button.
This will bring up a popup where you should make sure the checkbox next to ‘Products’ is checked. This will allow SearchWP to index your WooCommerce products.
Also, if you’d also like to include WooCommerce product reviews in your search results, then make sure you check the ‘Comments’ box, too. That’s because product reviews are actually stored as comments in WooCommerce.
Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Done’ button to close the popup and get ready to add the SKU search.
Now you need to scroll down to the ‘Products’ section. Notice that by default, the plugin will only look at the product title, content (description), slug, and excerpt (short description).
You can extend SearchWP’s reach to include SKUs by clicking on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button. This will bring up a popup where you can include specific custom fields and taxonomies in searches.
You’ll need to type ’SKU’ into the Custom Fields field and choose the _sku option from the dropdown menu. This will add SKUs to WooCommerce search results pages.
You can now click the ‘Done’ button.
Notice that there is now a new section labeled ‘Custom Fields’ with the _sku field underneath.
To begin with, the relevance slider will be set all the way to the left, which means that SKU search results will be given the lowest priority in search results.
Since SKUs are an important way to find your products, you should move the _sku slider all the way to the right, as you can see above.
When you’re done, go ahead and click on the ‘Save Engines’ button at the top of the screen to save your settings.
SearchWP will then start rebuilding your search index in the background. It may take a few minutes to complete, but after that, you will be able to search your WooCommerce store by product SKU.
SearchWP will automatically use any search forms on your online store, so there is no need to take any additional steps if you have them on your site already.
Do you want to customize the search results page on your WordPress website?
The search results page can help users find the content they are looking for. Customizing it will improve the user experience on your site, which can lead to more page views and conversions.
In this article, we will show you how to easily customize the search results page in WordPress without writing any code.
Why Customize the WordPress Search Results Page?
By default, your WordPress website comes with a basic search feature. It allows users to look for content matching their search terms, but the search results are not very good.
Often, search terms return no results, even when there are possibly several matches that would answer the user’s query.
The search itself is also slow and requires a page load. If multiple users end up using the search feature at once, then this could slow down your website.
By customizing your search results page in WordPress, you can create a faster search system with a better user experience and more helpful search results.
Sounds good? Let’s get started.
Step 1: Setting Up SearchWP as Your WordPress Search Engine
SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin on the market. It allows you to improve WordPress search by replacing it with a faster and more accurate search engine.
It automatically indexes your content in the background, which allows searches to run faster. You don’t need to replace the default WordPress search forms and templates.
Upon activation, you need to visit the SearchWP » Settings page and switch to the ‘License’ tab. Enter your plugin license key, which you can find in your account on the SearchWP website.
Next, you need to visit the SearchWP » Algorithm page to configure the search engine settings.
You will notice that SearchWP has set up a default search engine for you. It uses your WordPress posts, pages, and media as sources.
Under each source, you can adjust the sliders to give more relevance to one attribute than another.
Want to include more places on your website in search results? Just click on the ‘Sources & Settings’ button to add them.
For the sake of this tutorial, let’s add Comments as a search source.
After you click ‘Done’, a new tab will appear under the sources list. However, it will be empty, and to make it useful, you need to click on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.
This will bring up a popup where you can select which attributes you want to include in your search.
For instance, we picked Comment text as an attribute.
After adding an attribute, you can assign a weight to it in your search results.
More weight means that SearchWP will consider that attribute more relevant than other attributes when showing search results.
Just repeat the process if you need to add more attributes to a source.
Once you have finished reviewing search sources, you can go ahead and click on the ‘Save’ button.
SearchWP will now start building a search index based on your settings.
Once finished, you will see 100% as the Index Status.
The SearchWP engine will now automatically replace the default WordPress search. If you already have a search form on your website, then you can try it.
If you don’t have a search form on your website, then you can add one by visiting the Appearance » Widgets page.
Simply add the Search widget or block to your sidebar and click on the ‘Update’ button to save your changes.
Note: If your WordPress theme does not have any widget-ready areas, then you will not see the Widgets page under the Appearance menu.
Instead, you can add a Search block to your site by visiting the Appearance » Editor page.
This will launch the full site editor. You can add the Search block to any place where you want the search form to be displayed.
You can now visit your WordPress blog and try out your new and improved search feature.
Step 2: Creating Advanced Search Forms for Your WordPress Site
A plain search form looks okay and gets the job done. However, it is not very engaging, and users often don’t even notice it on a site.
SearchWP fixes this by allowing you to create highly useful and advanced search forms for your WordPress site.
Simply go to the SearchWP » Search Forms page and click the ‘Add New’ button.
On the next screen, click on the pencil icon next to the form name to give it a proper name.
This will help you recognize the form when you need to add it to your site later.
After that, you must choose a theme for your search form.
SearchWP comes with several options, including Basic, Category Search, Quick Search, Advanced, and Combined search forms.
Clicking on a theme will select it and show you a preview of what that search form would look like.
Simply pick a theme you would like to use for your search form and then scroll down to customize it.
From here, you can tweak the form settings, style your form, and choose colors.
Once you are finished, don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.
Note that this custom form will not automatically replace your default WordPress search form.
Instead, you will need to manually embed it on your site. Simply go to the Appearance » Widgets page (or Appearance » Editor if your WordPress theme doesn’t have sidebars).
From here, you need to add the Search Form block to your widget area or template in the site editor.
After that, choose the form you just created from the dropdown menu inside the block.
You will then see a preview of your custom search form on the screen.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ or ‘Update’ button to store your changes.
Step 3: Adjusting the Search Results to Promote Important Content
Now that you have replaced the default WordPress search with SearchWP, it is time to look at how you can generate even better search results.
We will start by promoting important content in search results. These could be blog posts that bring you more revenue, sales pages, lead-generation landing pages, and more.
First, you need to visit the SearchWP » Extensions page and install the Custom Results Order extension.
Next, you need to visit the SearchWP » Statistics page.
Here, you can see which search terms or keywords are popular among your users.
Note: If you have just installed the plugin, then you may not have enough data here. You can wait for users to enter a few search terms to collect more data.
Now, look for the keywords where you want to promote a particular post and page in the search results.
After that, go to the SearchWP » Algorithm page and select the ‘Custom Results Order’ tab.
Enter the keyword for the post or page that you want to promote inside the search query box, then click the ‘Add Search Query’ button.
SearchWP will show you the results for that particular query. You need to select the content you want to promote and then click the ‘Promote to Top’ button.
Your selected post or page will now start appearing at the top for that particular search keyword.
You can always return to the same page and unpin that post or page from the top by clicking on the ‘Remove Promotion’ button or perhaps adding a different one.
Step 4: Exclude Content From WordPress Search Results
Sometimes, you may have content you don’t want to appear in search results. For instance, you might have a page promoting an expired sales event or an outdated blog post.
SearchWP allows you to easily exclude any post or page you don’t want to include in search results.
First, you need to visit the SearchWP » Extensions page and install the Exclude UI extension.
After activation, you can simply edit the post or page you want to exclude from search results.
In the ‘Post’ panel on the edit screen, you will now see an option to exclude that post from search results.
Simply check the box next to ‘Exclude from search’ and click on the ‘Update’ button to save your changes.
SearchWP will now stop showing that post or page in search results.
Step 5: Make Search Results Appear Instantly in WordPress
Normally, your SearchWP search results will appear using the theme template file provided by your WordPress theme.
But what if you could show the users the results as soon as they start typing? This feature is called live search, and you may have already seen it on search engines like Google and Bing.
Let’s add live search to your WordPress site to make search a better experience for your users.
First, you need to visit the SearchWP » Extensions page and install the Live Search extension.
Upon activation, the extension will start working automatically.
You can now go to your website and start typing keywords into a search form to see it in action.
Step 6: Search in More Places on Your WordPress Site
SearchWP can be configured to search in more places on your WordPress website. For instance, it can search in custom fields, PDF documents, shortcode outputs, and more.
Depending on where you want to enable search, you can turn these features on and off as needed.
Enable Search for WordPress Custom Fields
WordPress custom fields allow you to store additional metadata for your WordPress posts and pages. They are also used by WordPress plugins to store data related to a post or page.
To include custom fields in your search sources, just go to the SearchWP » Algorithm page and click the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button below a source.
This will bring up a popup where you can select a specific custom field or select any meta key.
Simply click on ‘Done’ when you are finished, and don’t forget to click the ‘Save Engines’ button.
SearchWP will now start using custom fields as a source and will include matching posts in the search results.
SearchWP can also search inside PDF files and office documents uploaded in your WordPress media library.
Simply go to the SearchWP » Algorithm page and click on your search engine’s ‘Sources & Settings’ button.
This will bring up a popup where you need to make sure that ‘Media’ is selected as one of the sources.
Then, click the ‘Done’ button.
After that, scroll down to the sources list on the Engine settings page to find the Media tab.
From here, you need to click on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.
This will bring up a popup where you can select which attributes you want to include in your search results.
Make sure that the Document Content, PDF metadata, and Title attributes are selected.
Simply click on the ‘Done’ button after making your selection.
Next, you can move the slider up and down to adjust the weight you want to give to a particular attribute in search results.
Once you are finished, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Engines’ button to save your settings.
Enable Search in Shortcode Outputs
Many WordPress plugins use shortcodes to output data in your WordPress posts and pages.
If this shortcode data is important for your WordPress website and will help improve search results, then you can enable Shortcode Output parsing in SearchWP.
Simply go to the SearchWP » Settings page and scroll towards the bottom. From here, you need to turn on the ‘Parse Shortcodes’ option.
After that, you just need to click the ‘Wake Up Indexer’ button to run a new indexing process in the background that will include shortcode output in search results.
Step 7: Include eCommerce in WordPress Search Results
SearchWP makes it super easy to improve eCommerce search results in your online store.
We will show you how to turn it on for your WooCommerce store. Other integrations work similarly as well.
First, you need to go to the SearchWP » Extensions page and install the WooCommerce Integration extension.
Upon activation, go to the SearchWP » Algorithm page.
Then, click on the ‘Sources & Settings’ button for your search engine.
This will bring up a popup where you need to ensure that the ‘Products’ option is selected as one of the sources.
After that, click on ‘Done’ to exit the popup.
Now, scroll down on the Sources screen, and you will see the Products tab.
You can adjust the attribute weight by moving the sliders or clicking on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button to select custom fields or product categories.
Once finished, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Engines’ button to save your settings.
Do you want to make blog post comments show up in WordPress search results?
By default, WordPress search doesn’t include comments. This can make it difficult for your visitors to find interesting conversations and engage with other users.
In this article, we will show you how you can make blog comments searchable on your WordPress website.
Why Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress?
A lively and interesting comment section can keep people on your WordPress website longer and create a sense of community around your site.
However, since WordPress doesn’t include comments in its search results by default, visitors may struggle to find interesting discussions and connect with other users or revisit a specific comment thread on your WordPress blog.
You might even be using the comment section for your visitors to submit reviews or testimonials. Having searchable reviews can help to boost sales on your online store, since people will be more likely to find the exact product they’re searching for.
That being said, let’s see how you can fix these problems by making blog post comments searchable in WordPress.
How to Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress
The easiest way to make blog post comments searchable in WordPress is by using the SearchWP plugin.
To make your blog post comments searchable, you’ll need to install and activate SearchWP. If you need more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you will see a popup telling you that SearchWP has already created an engine for you to use. The first step is customizing this engine.
We’ll show you how to change the default engine in this guide, so you can go ahead and click on the ‘Close’ button to exit the popup.
You will now be taken to the SearchWP » Settings page automatically.
On this screen, click on the ‘License’ tab. You can now paste your key into the ‘License’ box.
You’ll find this information in the email you got when you purchased SearchWP and in your account on the SearchWP site.
Once you’ve pasted the license key, click on the ‘Activate’ button next to it.
Next, just click on the ‘Engines’ tab so that you can customize everything that the plugin will display in search results.
You will see here that by default, posts are searchable and are broken into title, content, slug, and excerpt.
To allow comments to be searchable on your site, you want to click on the ‘Sources & Settings’ button near the top-right part of the screen.
A popup will appear in the middle of your screen. Under the ‘Sources’ heading, you’ll see all the different types of content that SearchWP is capable of searching.
By default, the plugin searches your site’s posts, pages, and media.
Go ahead and check the ‘Comments’ box. You can then click on ‘Done.’
This includes all comments in the search results on your site.
You can further customize how your blog comments are searched by scrolling to the bottom of the ‘Engines’ tab. You’ll see a new section where you can configure how your comments will be searched.
To get started, click on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.
On this screen, you’ll see sections for the different parts of the comments that SearchWP includes in its search results, such as author name, email, and comment text itself.
SearchWP can search the comment’s author name and email address, plus the content of the comment itself.
In the following image, we’re telling SearchWP to look at the comment’s content by checking the ‘Comment’ box, as well as the name and email address of the person who posted it.
After making your selection, click on the ‘Done’ button.
Whatever options you checked will now appear under the ‘Comments’ section of the ‘Engines’ tab.
For each one, SearchWP has an ‘Applicable Attribute Relevance’ scale. This is the weight that SearchWP will give to each attribute when searching the comments on your blog.
Content that matches an attribute with high relevancy will appear higher in the search results. By contrast, content that matches an attribute that has less relevancy will appear lower in the user’s search results.
By default, all the attribute sliders are set to ‘low,’ but you can change that by simply dragging the slider to the right.
Every site is unique, so you may want to try different relevancy settings to see what gives you the most accurate and helpful search results.
If you decide later that want to remove an attribute from your search, you can simply repeat the steps above, but uncheck the box next to it.
Once you’re happy with how the search feature is set up, you can go ahead and click on the ‘Save Engines’ button.
After a few moments, SearchWP will show a message ‘The index needs to be rebuilt.’
If you do get this message, then go ahead and click on the ‘Rebuild Index’ button. This will add all of your site’s comments to the search index, so they appear in relevant results.
Once you’ve done that, SearchWP will look at your WordPress site’s comments when creating its search results.
How to Change SearchWP Settings
Now that your blog post comments are searchable, you may want to enable some advanced settings that will make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
To take a look at these advanced search settings, click on the ‘Advanced’ tab.
On this screen, you can change a lot of the plugin’s behavior such as making adjustments for misspellings.
For example, if someone makes a spelling mistake when typing in their search term, then SearchWP can show a ‘Did you mean?’ correction box with results that are similar to what the search query should have been.
The following image shows an example of how this might look on your website.
To use this feature in your searches, go ahead and check the ‘Automatic “Did you mean?” corrections’ box.
You’ll also need to check the ‘Partial matches (fuzzy when necessary)’ box, since the ‘Did You Mean?’ feature uses partial matches.
Do you want to include custom post types in WordPress search?
By default, WordPress will never show custom post types in its search results. That means your visitors may miss out on some great content, and you’ll miss out on extra page views.
In this article, we will show you how to include custom post types in WordPress search.
How to Include Custom Post Types in WordPress Search
Although WordPress has a built-in search feature, its quite limited. If you create custom post types in WordPress, then WordPress won’t include these items in search results.
The easiest way to include custom post types in WordPress search is by using the SearchWP plugin.
SearchWP is the best custom search plugin for WordPress, used by over 30,000 websites. It’s easy to use and lets you search content that isn’t included in the default WordPress search.
To include custom post types in WordPress search, you’ll need to install and activate SearchWP. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, click on the new ‘SearchWP’ button in your website’s toolbar. You can then go ahead and click on ‘Activate License.’
After you’ve done that, click on the ‘License’ tab.
You can now paste your license key into the ‘License’ box. You’ll find this key in the email you got when you purchased SearchWP and in your account on the SearchWP site.
Once you’ve pasted this information into the ‘License’ field, go ahead and click on the ‘Activate’ button next to it.
You can now set up SearchWP to include custom post types in WordPress search results.
To start, simply click on the ‘Engines’ tab.
On this screen, you’ll see sections for the different types of content on your WordPress site that SearchWP includes in its search results.
By default, this plugin searches your website’s media, posts, and pages.
To include custom post types in your searches, click on the ‘Sources & Settings’ button.
Under ‘Sources,’ you’ll see all your post types listed along with comments, media, and more. Simply find all of the custom post types that you want to include in your search results, and check their boxes.
After that, click on the ‘Done’ button.
You’ll now see a new section for each of your custom post types on your WordPress blog.
In each section, SearchWP shows all the attributes that it will look at when searching your custom post types.
For each attribute, SearchWP has an ‘Applicable Attribute Relevance’ scale. This is the weight that SearchWP gives to this attribute when searching your custom post types.
By default, the sliders for Title, Slug, and Excerpt are all the way to the right, so they have the most weight. The slider for Content is in the center, so it has less weight.
Want to change an attribute’s weight? Simply drag its slider.
You may want to try different relevancy settings to see what gives you the most accurate and helpful search results.
You can also remove attributes. For example, your custom post type may have attributes that you want SearchWP to ignore, like attributes that you added for your internal reference only.
To add or remove attributes, click on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.
To add an attribute, simply click to check its box.
If you want SearchWP to ignore an attribute, then go ahead and uncheck its box.
If you’ve created any custom taxonomies or custom fields, then you might want SearchWP to look at this content when searching your custom post types.
To do this, simply click on either the ‘Custom Fields’ or ‘Taxonomies’ fields. You can then type in the name of the attribute that you want to add, and click on it when it appears.
When you’re happy with your settings, click on the ‘Done’ button.
If you’ve added any attributes, custom fields or taxonomies, then you can change how much weight this content has. Just like we mentioned earlier, moving the slider to the right will give this attribute more weight which means it will have a bigger impact on the search results.
Once you’ve finished customizing SearchWP’s settings, scroll to the top of the screen.
You can then click on the ‘Save Engines’ button to save your changes.
At this point, SearchWP may show you the message ‘The index needs to be rebuilt.’
If you see this message, then go ahead and click on the ‘Rebuild Index’ button. This will add your custom post types to your site’s search index, so they will show up in the search results.
That’s it. WordPress will now include your custom post types in its search results.
Once you’ve done that, you may want to enable some advanced settings that will make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for.
To take a look at these settings, click on the ‘Advanced’ tab.
This screen lists some of the more advanced settings that you may want to use.
For example, if you want to show results that don’t quite match the term that the visitor searched for, then you can check the ‘Partial matches (fuzzy when necessary)’ box.
After adding custom post types to WordPress search, you may want to create a search form that only show the search results from your custom post type category, which can make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to create advanced search form in WordPress for custom post types.
Are you trying to fix issues with WordPress search not working on your website?
While WordPress comes with basic search feature, it has some common errors and limitations that can keep your visitors from finding what they’re looking for.
In this post, we’ll show you how to fix problems with WordPress search not working.
Why Do WordPress Search Errors Happen?
Most websites have a search feature that helps visitors find interesting content on your WordPress blog or products that they may want to buy on your online store.
However, WordPress’ built-in search feature is very basic.
By default, it doesn’t search all types of content such as comments, reviews, or custom post types. This may stop the visitor from finding what they’re looking for.
The built-in search also focuses on matching search words with the post or page content without paying attention to things such as tags, categories, or custom fields. This is important information that can help your visitors get more accurate search results.
Lastly, there’s no easy way to customize the built-in search. For example, if you wanted to prioritize a post’s titles over its excerpt, or exclude certain pages from WordPress search, you would need to edit the code.
With that in mind, let’s look at how you can easily fix common problems with WordPress search not working. Simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the issue you’re having with WordPress search.
While WordPress has built-in search feature, not all themes may come with a search bar design. If your theme doesn’t come with a search bar, then there are a few ways that you can create one.
You can add a Search block to any widget-ready area of your WordPress website such as the header or footer. This is a quick and easy way to show a search bar across every page of your WordPress site.
To add a Search block, simply go to Appearance » Widgets. You can then find the area where you want to add a search bar, and click on its arrow icon to expand.
Then, just click on the + icon.
In the popup that appears, type in ‘search’ and then select the Search block.
Once you’ve done that, you can customize the Search block using the row of icons that appears above the block. This includes changing the size of the search button and adding some text.
When you’re happy with how your Search block looks, go ahead and click on the ‘Update’ button. You can now visit your website to see the search bar live.
Another option is adding the Search block to a specific page or post. For example, you might just want to show a search bar on your homepage or landing page.
To do this, just open the page or post where you want to show your search bar. You can then click on the + icon and add a Search block following the same process described above.
WordPress’ ready-made Search block is an easy way to add basic search to your site. However, if you want complete control over how your search bar looks and acts, then you’ll need a page builder plugin.
SeedProd is the best drag and drop page builder for WordPress and comes with over 80 professionally-designed blocks including a Search Form block. This allows you to instantly add a search bar to any area of your WordPress website.
All you need to do is open SeedProd’s editor and then drag and drop the Search Form block into place on your website’s layout.
Once you’ve done that, you can customize it using all the settings in the left-hand menu.
Once you’ve added a search bar, you can use the SeedProd theme builder to design a completely custom search results page that perfectly matches your brand. For more information, please see our guide on how to easily create a custom WordPress theme.
How to Fix WordPress Search Showing 404 Error
When a visitor performs a search, your site may show a 404 error such as ‘This page could not be found!’
You can often fix 404 errors by regenerating your permalinks. This rebuilds and repairs the WordPress permalink structure without changing anything on your site.
This may sound complex, but WordPress does all of the hard work for you.
To regenerate your permalinks, simply go to Settings » Permalinks.
Then, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.
That’s it. WordPress will now regenerate your permalink structure. To make sure it worked, head over to your site and try performing a search.
How to Fix WordPress Search Showing Irrelevant Results
Every time a visitor performs a search, you’ll want to show relevant search results. This helps visitors find interesting content, which will keep them on your site for longer and increase your sales and conversions.
However, the built-in WordPress search doesn’t always show the most accurate results. This is because it looks for the search term in your post’s title and content only.
With that in mind, we recommend installing an advanced search plugin.
SearchWP is the best custom search plugin for WordPress, used by over 30,000 websites. SearchWP can search every part of your site including custom fields, WooCommerce products, categories and tags, PDF files, and more.
You can use SearchWP to adjust your website’s search algorithm and make sure your most important content appears at the top of the visitor’s search results.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the SearchWP plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, click on the new ‘SearchWP’ button in your website’s toolbar. You can then go ahead and click on ‘Activate License.’
Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘License’ tab.
You can now either paste or type your license into the ‘License’ box. You’ll find this key in the email you got when you purchased SearchWP.
After that, go ahead and click on the ‘Activate’ button.
SearchWP integrates with WordPress search automatically, so right away your site will start showing more accurate results. However, to get the best results you’ll want to customize SearchWP’s search engine settings.
Here it helps to think about the way that search engines such as Google rank their content.
These search engines use algorithms to find high-quality content that closely matches the search term. It then ranks this content to make sure the best matches appear at the top of the search results page.
With SearchWP you can build your own algorithms and set your own rules, just like Google. This can improve the visitor experience, boost your conversions, and help you make money online with WordPress.
To configure SearchWP’s settings, click on the ‘Engines’ tab.
On this screen, you’ll see sections for the different types of WordPress content such as pages and posts.
For each section, SearchWP shows the attributes it looks at when performing a search. In the following image, we can see that SearchWP searches the page’s title, content, slug, and the page’s excerpt.
There is also an ‘Applicable Attribute Relevance’ scale for each attribute. This is the weight that SearchWP gives to each attribute when ranking its search results.
In the following image, we can see that a post’s title has more weight than its URL slug.
You can make an attribute more or less relevant using its slider.
There are no settings that are guaranteed to provide accurate results for every website. With that in mind, you may want to try different relevancy settings to see what gives you the most accurate search results.
You can also add different types of content to be included in your search results. For example, you can add PDF searching and indexing in WordPress if you have PDF files you want your visitors to be able to search for.
If you have any custom taxonomies or fields, then you can also tell SearchWP to look at this content when searching your site.
To add or remove attributes, click on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.
This opens a popup. To get SearchWP to ignore an attribute, simply uncheck its box.
If you want to add an attribute, then click to check its box.
Want to include a custom field or taxonomy in your searches?
Simply type in the name of that field or taxonomy, and then select it when it appears.
Once you’re happy with your attributes, click on the ‘Done’ button.
You can now change the relevancy for your new attributes following the same process described above.
Once you’re connected to your site, you can use FTP to open the wp-content/themes/ folder.
Inside the ‘themes’ folder, find the theme you’re currently using on your WordPress website. You can then open this folder and find the search.php file.
Next simply click on the search.php file and select ‘View/Edit.’
This will open search.php in your computer’s default text editor.
Now, check this template for any queries that contain query_posts, new WP_Query, or get_posts. This usually means that your theme is performing a redundant search.
If search.php has any of these queries, then we recommend switching to an alternative WordPress theme. To help you out, we’ve created a list of the most popular and best WordPress themes.
Another option is to hire a WordPress developer who can write a new template that doesn’t perform a redundant search.
How to Fix WooCommerce Product Search Not Showing Accurate Results
Fast search helps visitors find what they’re looking for in less time. This will improve the user experience and can increase your pageviews and conversion rate.
Unfortunately, the built-in WordPress search isn’t particularly fast. As you add more content, you may notice that your site takes longer and longer to return the search results.
The good news is that there are ways to speed up your site’s search. If you’re using an advanced search plugin like SearchWP, then you’re already off to a great start.
SearchWP is designed to deliver search results, fast. It’s also fully customizable, so you can ignore some of your site’s content when performing a search. For example, you may tell SearchWP to ignore your media metadata. This can speed up your search by reducing the amount of content it has to look through.
You can also improve the search experience by adding live Ajax search to your WordPress site. This is a dropdown that guesses what visitors are searching for as they type, which can make your searches feel instant.
Are you looking for the best WordPress database plugins for your site?
WordPress database plugins can help you clean up your database to improve website performance, assist with website migrations, and more.
In this article, we’ve hand picked some of the best database plugins for your WordPress site.
Why Use a WordPress Database Plugin?
WordPress stores a lot of information in your database, from comments, to posts, user information, plugin data, and more.
Over time your database can become cluttered, which can slow down your website and even cause WordPress errors. WordPress database plugins can help optimize and clean up your database to make sure your site is as fast as possible.
Other WordPress database plugins can help you store and display data, backup your database to keep your site safe, and more.
With that said, let’s show you some of the best WordPress database plugins you can use with your site.
It allows you to create a complete backup of your WordPress website and store it safely in the cloud or your computer. You can choose to backup your entire WordPress site and databases or select specific website files.
You can also backup your site and databases to Dropbox, Amazon S3, FTP, email, Google Drive, and more.
The premium version comes with more addons to migrate and clone websites, use database search and replace, access multisite support, and more.
There’s a library of over 300+ templates you can use to get started, and every template can be completely customized with the drag and drop builder.
When a user submits a form on your site, all form data is automatically saved in your WordPress database.
WPForms then takes this data and makes it easy to view within your WordPress dashboard. You can see all the contact data, field labels, number of entries, and more. It’s essentially a frontend database of your contact list.
When you’re migrating a website, you usually need to make changes to the database, URLs, media files, and more.
This plugin makes it easy to run a search and replace in your WordPress database. It also has advanced controls, so you can select specific tables, see what fields will be replaced before running the plugin, and more.
It even supports a WordPress multisite network, if you’re migrating an entire network of WordPress sites at once.
Formidable Forms is a relational database plugin and the most advanced WordPress form builder in the market.
With this plugin, you can upload and collect data through front end forms, then you can display that data on your website in a variety of different ways.
The Formidable Views addon available on the Plus plan lets you display data in a grid, table, calendar, and other formats. This is useful for creating a job board, showing real estate listings, displaying registered users, and more.
All data submitted through the forms you create with the plugin automatically goes to your WordPress database. Then, you can use the backend interface to sort, filter, and search through your data.
You can also allow users to upload images, blog posts, and other forms of data.
Formidable Forms lets you create a frontend database for WordPress with their advanced Views addon.
Easy Username Updater is a free plugin that makes it easy to change your WordPress username.
WordPress makes it easy to change your full name from your user profile. But, if you want to change your username, then you’ll need to use a tool like phpMyAdmin to make changes to your database.
This plugin simplifies the process and lets you simply change your username and the usernames of other users right from your WordPress admin panel.
JetPack Backup is a popular WordPress backup plugin by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. It was initially launched as VaultPress but has been relaunched and redesigned as Jetpack Backup.
The plugin offers daily automated backups without slowing down your website. These backups also include a full WordPress database backup.
This backup solution is also geared towards WooCommerce store owners, so your order and customer data are always safe.
Beyond backups, you can restore your entire site to a previous version with a single click.
The plugin makes it easy to create beautiful tables without writing any code. There are unique features that make your tables more interactive, like pagination, filtering, sorting, and more.
You can import and export existing tables in CSV, Excel, HTML, and JSON format. This makes it easy to migrate your tables from another table plugin.
TablePress stores all of the table data in your WordPress database.
The plugin gives you complete control over your website search algorithm, so you can choose how you want content to rank in your WordPress search results.
It creates its own custom WordPress database to store and maintain its own search index.
This means you get access to your search data, so you can improve your content and create a better user experience.
Advanced WordPress Reset lets you reset and restore your WordPress database to it’s original status like a fresh WordPress install.
You can also reset specific areas of your WordPress site such as clean up uploads folder, delete all comments, remove all plugins, etc.
This is a really powerful plugin that’s often used by developers and freelancers when building staging websites or testing. It’s not something you want to use on a live website.
wpDataTables is a premium table plugin that makes it easy to add visually stunning tables to WordPress.
The plugin has an easy to use table builder, so you can create feature rich tables without writing any code.
It’s equipped with features that let you add star ratings, style different cells, add shortcodes, and much more.
It also has unique features that prevent deleting tables in the WordPress database and can connect your tables to multiple WordPress databases.
Final Thoughts on WordPress Database Plugins
While the above list contains the most popular use-cases of WordPress database plugins, it’s important to emphasize that almost all WordPress plugins interact with the database.
So it’s really impossible to create a best WordPress database plugin list without fully understanding the use-case.
Here are some other bonus WordPress plugins that interact with the database:
AIOSEO – best WordPress SEO plugin used by over 3 million sites. It stores your website’s SEO data in WordPress database including all 404 errors and other useful insights.
SeedProd – best drag & drop website builder for WordPress. It lets you create custom WordPress themes without any code, and all data is stored in the database.
HubSpot – one of the best WordPress CRM software that helps you create a contact database in WordPress. It works well with WPForms.
MonsterInsights – best WordPress analytics plugin that brings your Google Analytics data inside your WordPress dashboard.
MemberPress – allows you to create a members only area and sell courses in WordPress. Lets you store a members directory in WordPress database.
AffiliateWP – best WordPress affiliates plugin that allows you to create and manage a partner referral program in WordPress database and dashboard.
Sugar Calendar – simple and light-weight event management system allowing you to use your WordPress database as a calendar solution.
WP Mail SMTP – stores a log of all emails sent by your WordPress site in a database, so you can ensure emails are actually getting delivered to your customers.
That’s just a quick list of bonus plugins that interact with the WordPress database that you may want to use.
Do you want to make multiple search forms in WordPress?
By default, a search form will look through all your pages, posts, and media on your website. However, you can often improve the visitor experience by creating multiple forms that search specific categories, content types, and more.
In this article, we will show you how you can add and use multiple search forms on your WordPress site.
Why Use Multiple Search Forms in WordPress?
A search form can help visitors find what they are looking for, fast. However, if you have lots of content, then it might make sense to create multiple forms that search specific types of content.
By using different search forms in different locations across your site, you can help visitors get accurate and helpful search results, no matter how much content you have published. This will improve the visitor experience and reduce the bounce rate.
That being said, let’s show you how to create multiple search forms in WordPress.
Create a New WordPress Search Algorithm With a WordPress Plugin
The easiest way to add multiple search forms to your WordPress website is by using the SearchWP plugin. It’s one of the best search plugins for WordPress, used by over 30,000 sites.
With SearchWP, you can search content that WordPress ignores by default, including custom post types, PDF files, WooCommerce products, and categories. You can also create multiple different search forms and then add those forms to any page, post, or widget-ready area.
Setting Up SearchWP
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the SearchWP plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, go to SearchWP » Settings and then click on the ‘General’ tab.
With that done, just click the ‘Verify Key’ button.
Create a Custom Search Algorithm For WordPress
After entering the license key, it’s a good idea to fine-tune how SearchWP indexes, searches, and displays your content. You can think of this as creating a custom Google search algorithm that’s just for your WordPress blog or website.
These are the general settings that all search forms will use by default. You can override these settings for the individual search forms.
To get started, head over to SearchWP »Algorithm.
Here, you will see a section for the different content types that SearchWP searches by default, such as pages and posts.
You will notice that each item has an ‘Applicable Attribute Relevance’ scale. This is the weight (importance) that SearchWP will give to each attribute.
Content that matches an attribute with high relevancy will appear higher in the search results. By contrast, content that matches an attribute that has less relevancy will appear lower on the search results page.
To change the relevancy, simply drag the different sliders. For example, if you move the ‘Title’ slider to the left and the ‘Content’ slider to the right, then the content will carry more weight than the title.
You can even tell SearchWP to search content that WordPress ignores by default.
To do this, click on the ‘Sources & Settings’ button.
When you are happy with your changes, simply click on the ‘Done’ button.
This adds a new section for each content type. Once again, you can change the attribute relevance using the different sliders.
When you are happy with how the search algorithm is set up, just scroll to the top of the screen and click the ‘Save’ button.
SearchWP will now rebuild the index automatically. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection and your WordPress hosting provider, this may take a few minutes.
As soon as you see ‘Index Status 100%’, you will know that SearchWP has indexed all your content and settings.
Create Multiple Different Search Forms in WordPress
Now, you can create as many different search forms as you want.
To get started, head over to SearchWP » Search Forms and click the ‘Add New’ button.
This creates a new search form, ready for you to customize. For example, if you run a review website, then you might create a form that searches for product review posts and ignores other content like your blog posts and media.
To start, you will need to give the form a unique name by clicking on the small pencil icon next to ‘Search Form 1’.
You now type in a name for the custom search form.
Since you are going to make multiple search forms in WordPress, it’s important to use a name that helps you identify this form in the WordPress dashboard.
After that, you can choose a layout using the ‘Layout Theme’ thumbnails.
Some of these layouts are designed for specific search forms. For example, if you are creating a form that searches by category in WordPress, then we recommend selecting ‘Category Search’, as it already has many of the settings you need.
Simply click on the different themes to see a preview of how this form will look on your website. After making your decision, scroll to the ‘Custom Styling’ section.
The settings you see may vary depending on your theme layout. For example, if you selected ‘Quick Search’, then the ‘Quick Search’ setting will be enabled by default.
You can disable and enable the different options using their toggles. The live preview will update automatically as you make changes, so you can try different settings to see what works the best.
Depending on your layout and the kind of form you want to create, you may need to enable and disable some of the ‘Custom Styling’ settings.
Do you want to create a form that searches by category? Then you will need to enable the ‘Category Search’ toggle.
After that, find the ‘Select Category’ field and type in each category that you want to include in the search results. For example, if you run an online store, then you may want to create forms that search specific WooCommerce product categories.
If you want to allow visitors to filter their search results using factors like the author, post type, and tag, then you will need to click to enable the ‘Advanced Search’ toggle.
After that, scroll to the ‘Advanced Search Filter/s’ field. By default, SearchWP allows visitors to filter their results using Authors, Post Types, and Tags.
To remove any of these filters, just click on its ‘X’ button. If you want to add more filters, then simply type their names into the field.
Then, when the right option appears in the dropdown, give it a click.
By default, the form will search media, pages, and posts. If you have created custom post types, then you may want to include these in the search results.
To do this, find the ‘Type of search’ field and give it a click.
You can now type in the name of each custom post type.
When the right custom post type appears, click to add it to the search.
Do you want to exclude media, pages, or posts from the search results?
Then just click the small ‘X’ next to ‘Media’, ‘Pages’, or ‘Posts’.
When you are happy with the type of content that SearchWP will search, you may want to add some placeholder text to the search bar.
Here, we recommend letting visitors know how the search form works and the results they should expect to get. For example, if you have an online marketplace, then you may want to use text such as ‘Search for products’ or ‘Start shopping’.
By default, SearchWP will show a generic ‘Enter keyword and search’ message. You can replace this with your own messaging by typing into ‘Field Label’.
By default, the search form shows a magnifying glass and a blue ‘Search’ button.
To remove the ‘Search’ button, simply click to deactivate the ‘Search Button’ toggle.
When you are happy with these settings, scroll to the ‘Form Style’ section.
Here, you can choose between different form styles, add a border, and change the font size.
Under ‘Button Style,’ you can customize the ‘Search’ button that appears in the form.
Finally, when you are happy with how the form is set up, you can scroll to the top of the screen and click on ‘Save’ to store your settings.
To create more custom search forms with unique settings, simply repeat the exact same process described above.
Add Multiple Search Forms to Your WordPress Site
You can add multiple search forms to any page, post, or widget-ready area using either a shortcode or the Search Form block.
Since it’s the easiest, let’s start by looking at the block method.
How to Add Search Forms to a Page or Post
You may want to add a search form to a specific page or post or even show it inside the post content.
For example, you might add a search form to your FAQ page, documentation, help desk, knowledge base, or similar. This can improve the customer experience by helping users find answers and useful resources.
To get started, simply head over to the page or post where you want to add the form.
You can then click on the ‘+’ icon and type in ‘Search Form’.
When the right block appears, give it a click.
You can now open the ‘Select a Form’ dropdown and choose the form you want to show on this page or post.
When you are ready to make the search form live, just click on either ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’. Now, simply visit this page or post to see the search form in action.
How to Add Search Forms to a Widget-Ready Area
Another option is to add a search form to a widget-ready area, such as the sidebar or similar section. This is an easy way to show the same search bar across multiple pages on your WordPress website.
Go to Appearance » Widgets to see all the different areas where you can add widgets.
The options you see may vary depending on your WordPress theme. For example, if you are using the Astra theme, then the sidebar widget area is called ‘Main Sidebar’.
Simply click the ‘+’ block icon in the area where you want to add a widget.
Then, type in ‘Search Form’.
When the right block appears, click to add it to your website.
You can now open the dropdown menu and choose the search form that you want to use.
When you are finished, just click the ‘Update’ button to make the search form live.
Now, you can visit your site to see the improved search form.
How to Add Search Forms Using the Full Site Editor
If you are using a block WordPress theme, then you can add search forms using the full site editor. It includes areas that you can’t edit using the standard WordPress content editor. For example, you can add a search form to your 404 template in WordPress.
To get started, head over to Appearance » Editor in the WordPress dashboard.
By default, the full site editor shows your theme’s home template, but you can add a search form to any template.
In the left-hand menu, simply click on ‘Templates’ or Template Parts’ depending on where you want to add the search form.
You will now see a list of all the templates that make up your WordPress theme.
Simply find the template or template part that you want to edit, and give it a click.
WordPress will now show a preview of this template.
To go ahead and edit the template, click on the small pencil icon.
Now, click on the ‘+’ icon.
In the panel that appears, type in ‘Search Form’.
When the right block shows up, drag and drop it into your layout.
You can now open the dropdown menu and choose the search form that you want to use.
With that done, just click on the ‘Save’ button to make your changes live.
How to Add a Search Form to WordPress Using a Shortcode
Another option is to add a search form using its shortcode. This may be an easier option if you want to add the same search form to multiple pages, posts, or widget-ready areas, as you can simply paste the same shortcode into multiple locations.
To get a search form’s shortcode, head over to SearchWP »Search Forms. Here, find the search form that you want to show and copy the value in the ‘Shortcode’ column.
You can now add the shortcode to any page, post, or widget-ready area. For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to add a shortcode in WordPress.
Do you want your visitors to easily search custom fields to find content on your website?
WordPress search doesn’t work with custom fields by default, which can make it harder for your visitors to find what they need. By making custom fields searchable, you can provide a better user experience for your visitors.
In this article, we’ll show you how to make custom fields searchable in WordPress.
What Are Custom Fields & Why Make Them Searchable?
WordPress custom fields allow you to store any kind of additional information (metadata) about a post or page.
WordPress adds metadata such as title, author, date, time, and more to your posts and pages. With custom fields, you can add more information about your content, and display them on your website if you wish. A lot of popular WordPress plugins and themes use custom fields to store important data.
For example, the content you enter in your WordPress SEO plugins such as All in One SEO is technically a custom field, or custom product attributes that you may add to your WooCommerce products sometimes are also custom fields.
However, WordPress doesn’t search content on your website using custom fields. By default, when a visitor uses a search bar on your website, WordPress will only show them results where the title and content match their search terms.
Making your custom fields searchable improves the user experience on your WordPress website. It allows your visitors to search for any content with ease, keeping them on your website longer and reducing any frustration.
That said, let’s look at how you can make custom fields searchable.
Making Custom Field Searchable in WordPresss
The easiest way to make custom fields searchable is by using the SearchWP plugin. It’s the best WordPress search plugin and allows you to adjust the search algorithm without editing code.
The plugin indexes everything on your WordPress site. For instance, it uses custom fields, PDF documents, text, custom tables, files, categories, shortcodes, and more to improve WordPress search for your users.
Besides that, SearchWP works seamlessly with other popular plugins like Advanced Custom Fields, Meta Box, Toolset, Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, and Pods.
To start indexing your custom fields, first you’ll need to install and activate the SearchWP plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you can head over to Settings » SearchWP and then navigate to the ‘Engines’ tab from the WordPress admin panel.
After that, you’ll need to click the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button to add custom fields to the search algorithm for your posts, pages, and media.
When you click the button, a popup window will now appear.
Go ahead and click the dropdown menu under Custom Fields and then select the ‘Any Meta Key’ option to make all your custom fields searchable. Or you can type the custom fields you want to include during the search process. if you don’t want to include them all.
Once you’ve chosen the custom fields, simply click the ‘Done’ button.
A custom fields option will now be added to the search algorithm for posts. You can see the ‘Custom Fields’ under the Applicable Attribute Relevance section.
Next, you can adjust the attribute slider to set the relevance weight given to each attribute during a search.
For example, if you move the slider to the right and set it to maximum, then SearchWP will give high preference to the data in the custom fields when searching content on your site.
You can now repeat the step for making custom fields searchable for pages and media files.
After making these changes, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Engines’ button.
SearchWP will now index your content, PDF metadata, custom fields metadata, images, files, and other types of metadata to include in WordPress search.
You’ll be able to see the ‘Index Status’ in the right corner and view how many items the plugin has indexed.
Besides that, SearchWP also offers other customization settings.
For instance, if you go to the ‘Settings’ tab, then you can add stopwords and synonyms to be ignored during the search process to improve relevancy and performance.
The plugin will already have a list by default, but you can add more stopwords if you want. Similarly, you can add synonyms for search terms that you want to ignore while searching.
Next, you can edit more settings by going to the ‘Advanced’ tab.
For example, the plugin lets you enable the option to show partial matches when search terms show no result, limit results to exact matches when double quotes are used, remove minimum word length, and more.
Now, if you want to see the search history and see which queries your users search the most, then head over to the ‘Statistics’ tab.
The plugin will give all the stats about your WordPress search from the past 30 days or the last 1 year. You can use this data to see which queries your users search while on your site and come up with new content ideas.
