WordPress has matured from its days of infancy; from being an online tool for people who wanted to diarize their life stories, to being one of the most prominent content management systems available in today’s digital design tools market. According to a survey from W3Techs, WordPress powers an impressive 26.4% of the web and there are 500 new websites being built every day using this software platform.
If you are one, among the many, who are using WordPress as their web CMS of choice, you know the powerful features it comes with. Although WordPress is one of the best CMS options out there, it does have one weakness and that is its default internal search. Fortunately, there are plugins for making WordPress search more usable for site visitors.
Here are 4 plugins that will help enhance WordPress search usability:
1. BETTER SEARCH
This free plugin requires minimal setup and, once installed, replaces the WordPress default search. Some of the great features of this particular plugin include the ability to see what the most popular search terms are and its ability to conduct search results within pages, posts and custom posts.
2.SEARCH EVERYTHING
At a zero cost, this free plugin is quick to install and will essentially do the work for you (after your initial setup). A unique feature of this plugin is it’s “research everything” component,which provides the ability to search through everything, ranging from your posts, to attachments, and link directly to them via the text editor.
3. SWIFTYPE SEARCH
A great tool for improving WordPress search, particularly if your site has a lot of content, is the Swiftype search plugin. This plug-in offers a drag and drop interface, whereby you can ensure specific keywords that are searched will result in specific posts appearing at the top of the list in the search results.
4. RELEVANNSI
Another plugin that essentially replaces the default search in WordPress is Relevannsi. This search tool gives site visitors the ability to execute targeted searches to produce an exact match to what they are searching for by simply using quotations around their “search words/phrases”. This plugin produces search results for partial words used in the search field and goes the extra step to produce search results for the entire word as well.
If you want to ensure that your site visitors can find what they are after from your site, you definitely want to tweak your WordPress search in order to make it more usable and effective.
