Consumer and business browsing behaviors continue to change as they self-serve and seek the information they need without contacting your company. While taxonomies, breadcrumbs, related content, and design are critical user interface elements that assist visitors, internal site search is often overlooked.
WordPress Site Search
While WordPress has had an internal search functionality since its inception, it’s largely dependent on the editor’s abilities to optimize titles, categories, tags, and content.
That can introduce experience issues, though. If you optimize for internal search, you can lose engagement in your content. Optimize for readers; you can lose accuracy with WordPress’s internal search. And if you’re using WooCommerce, you’re losing sales.
People on eCommerce sites are 2x more likely to purchase something when they search
Econsultancy
Jetpack Advanced Site Search
The parent company of WordPress continues to offer paid services and add-ons, with one of the more popular plugins being Jetpack. Jetpack is a fantastic plugin that can keep your site safe, increase your site speed, enhance your site’s capabilities, and report on it with a solid analytics package.
One of the most exciting features, though, is Jetpack Search… a fantastic enhancement to WordPress’ search capabilities that empower users with additional prioritization, filters, and categorization search of posts, pages, products, and any other custom post type. Features include:
- Highly relevant results with modern ranking algorithms
- Boosted and prioritized results based on your site stats
- Instant search and filtering without reloading the page
- Filtered and faceted searches (by tags, categories, dates, custom taxonomies, and post types)
- Improved theme compatibility for both desktop and mobile
- Real-time indexing, so your search index will update within minutes of changes to your site
- Support for all languages, and advanced language analysis for 29 languages
- Highlighted search terms on comments and post content
- Quick and accurate spelling correction
If people can get the answers they want quickly without having to email me, it’s pure gold and it makes my job easier. I’m advertising it in my client consultations and telling people to use it because it actually works.
Kylie Mawdsley, Interior Design Consultant, Kylie M. Interiors
Martech Zone Site Search
I tested Jetpack Search on Martech Zone, and it was a solid offering. Users can tweak the priority of the results by relevance or age of the post. Or, they can filter the results based on categories, tags, or the year it was published.
Administrators can customize the internal search interaction and design with several options:
- Setting the default sort order by relevance, newest, or oldest item.
- Enabling a dark or light theme.
- Opening an input overlay when the user starts typing or clicks search.
- Ability to exclude posts, pages, custom post types, or media.
- Ability to choose from different formats.
- Ability to change the background opacity on the overlay.
- Ability to change the highlight color of search terms in the search results.
Jetpack Search is a paid upgrade priced separately or combined with your overall Jetpack package.
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