Tag: searchwp

How to Optimize the Customer Journey for WooCommerce Store
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:
1. Awareness stage: Make it easier for potential customers to find your online store and learn more about your business.
2. Consideration stage: Make it easier for your customers to find and learn about the products they need.
3. Decision stage: Optimize your checkout to encourage your customers to make a purchase.
4. Service stage: Improve your after-sales communications, express your appreciation for the sale, and better support your customers.
5. 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:
Build Customer Awareness

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.

You can learn how to install the MonsterInsights plugin and addon in our guide on how to track user journeys in WooCommerce.

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.

Using the data, you can then fix these issues and optimize your site for more conversions. For example, you can use the tips in our guides on how to convert WooCommerce visitors into customers and how to make a high-converting sales funnel.

2. Make Your Store More Visible Online

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.

You will find step-by-step instructions in our guide to WooCommerce SEO made easy.

Help Customers Consider Your Products

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 see how easy it is to use SeedProd in our guide on how to customize WooCommerce product pages.

4. Make It Easier for Customers to Find Products

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.

We show you how to use this plugin to give your customers the best product search in our guide on how to customize the WooCommerce product search results page.

You may also want to learn how to enable search by product SKU in WooCommerce.

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.

We take you through the whole setup process in our guide on how to set up automated drip notifications in WordPress.

6. Show Off Your Positive Customer Reviews

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.

For more details, see our guide on how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress.

Help Customers Complete Their Purchases

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.

We have written a detailed guide on how to create a custom WooCommerce cart page that’s full of ideas for how to personalize your shopping cart for more conversions.

8. Show Custom Offers to Your Customers

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.

That’s why we recommend using OptinMonster. It is the best WordPress lead-generation software and has an Onsite Retargeting feature that can help reduce 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.

You can set up smart, automated follow-up emails and workflows using FunnelKit Automations, which is a popular WooCommerce plugin for marketing automation.

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.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to customize your WooCommerce emails.

10. Engage With Customers in Real Time

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.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to add live chat to your WooCommerce store.

Build Customer Loyalty

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.

You can also inspire loyalty to your brand by:
- Adding a points system that lets customers earn a reward like a coupon or discount.
- 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.
- Creating a WooCommerce contest to boost loyalty and engagement.
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.

You can see our complete list of tips by visiting our guide on the best WooCommerce automations to increase sales.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to optimize the WooCommerce customer journey for your online store. You may also want to see our guide on how to add wholesale pricing to WooCommerce, or our expert picks for the best WooCommerce WordPress themes.

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The post How to Optimize the Customer Journey for WooCommerce Store first appeared on WPBeginner.
12.09.2023
12 WordPress Search Plugins to Improve Your Site Search (2023)
Are you looking for the best WordPress search plugin to improve your site search?

The default WordPress search feature is quite limited and ignores a lot of the content on your website. Thankfully, there are several WordPress plugins that can help you improve the default search experience.

In this article, we will highlight the best WordPress search plugins to improve your site search.

Why Use a WordPress Search Plugin?

WordPress comes with a built-in search feature that can help visitors easily find what they are looking for.

However, it is quite basic and doesn’t search all your site’s content, including comments, files, and products.

The good news is that there are several search plugins that can help you improve the built-in WordPress search feature. Some of these plugins are built for specific purposes, like searching WooCommerce products, while others improve the search experience across your entire WordPress blog or website.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress search plugins. Simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the plugin you want to learn more about:
1. SearchWP

SearchWP is one of the best search plugins for WordPress. It is very easy to use and provides much more accurate search results compared to the built-in WordPress search.

SearchWP can search content that WordPress ignores by default, including custom post types, WooCommerce products, comments, PDFs, and more.

You can create a completely custom search algorithm, similar to the algorithms used by search engines such as Google. This allows you to assign a weight (importance) to each attribute.

Content that matches an attribute with high relevancy will appear higher in the search results. By contrast, content with an attribute that has less relevancy will appear lower in the user’s search results.

For example, if you have uploaded your menu as a PDF on your restaurant website, then this is important content, and you will typically want to show it high in the search results.

With that in mind, you can simply assign this content a higher attribute relevance so that matches appear high in the search results.

SearchWP also integrates with WooCommerce, so you can make a smart WooCommerce product search and even customize the product search results page.

You can even include product attributes, tags, reviews, and custom fields and taxonomies in the WooCommerce search results.

In the following image, we have added ‘color’ and ‘size’ as searchable custom fields and added product tags and categories in the taxonomies field.

After creating a custom search algorithm, you can then create an unlimited number of custom search forms.

For example, if you sell digital downloads like eBooks, then you might make a search form that searches content with the ‘ebook’ tag. In this way, you can help shoppers find new books that they may want to buy.

For step-by-step instructions on how to set up this plugin, please see our guide on how to improve WordPress search with SearchWP.

Pros:
- Automatically integrates with the built-in WordPress search.
- Looks great with any WordPress theme.
- Built-in search statistics.
- Integrates with many popular WordPress plugins, including WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and bbPress.
Cons:
- Doesn’t include live Ajax search. However, you can add this missing feature by installing the free SearchWP Live Ajax Search plugin.
- No free plugin, so you’ll need to purchase a license to try SearchWP.
Why we chose SearchWP: SearchWP is a complete search toolkit that integrates perfectly with the native WordPress search. Simply create a search algorithm, and all the search fields and forms across your website will use SearchWP automatically.

Pricing: Licenses start from $199 per year.

2. ElasticPress

ElasticPress is a hosted WordPress search service built on ElasticSearch.

Instead of running on your WordPress site, it runs the search queries in the cloud and shows results at lightning speed. It is extremely easy to integrate on any WordPress site and works with all the best WordPress hosting providers.

ElasticPress can search content that the default WordPress search ignores, including custom fields, tags, PDF files, Microsoft Office documents, metadata, and more.

ElasticPress has built-in live Ajax search, so you can show instant results as the user is typing. It also works well with WooCommerce, so shoppers can quickly find products they are interested in buying.

You can create your own search algorithm using the Weighting dashboard and can even customize the top search terms to display your most popular WooCommerce products or top-performing content first.

Pros:
- Built-in autosuggest.
- An advanced connector that can handle almost any search query.
- Shows related posts and document content in the search results.
- A hosted service, so ElasticPress won’t slow down your WordPress website.
Cons:
- ElasticPress is a hosted service and is a lot more expensive than any other search solution on this list. This means it may not be the best choice for beginners, personal blogs, or anyone who is working with a smaller budget.
Why we chose ElasticPress: By offloading search to an external server, you can improve your WordPress search without slowing down your website. This may not be the cheapest search plugin on our list, but it’s a great choice for business websites or enterprise sites that need lightning-fast search.

Pricing: Licenses start at $79 per month.

3. Ivory Search

Ivory Search is another excellent WordPress search plugin that replaces the default WordPress search.

To improve search results, Ivory Search looks at post types, image metadata, custom fields, shortcodes, attachments, and more.

You can also use Ajax to show live search results without reloading the page.

The plugin also integrates with the WordPress theme customizer, so you can change how the search form looks using the tools you are already familiar with.

With Ivory Search, you can create an unlimited number of forms with unique settings.

You can then add these forms to different areas of your site using a shortcode that the plugin creates automatically.

You can also add an advanced search form to any widget-ready area, such as the sidebar, using the Ivory Search block. This makes it easy to show the same form across your entire WordPress website.

Another option is to add the search bar to any navigation menu. In the Ivory Search settings, you can simply enable the toggle for the menu where you want to show the search field.

Studying the way that people use your website’s search can also help you learn more about your users. This includes finding any content gaps where visitors are searching for content that you don’t already have on your website.

To provide this data, Ivory Search integrates with Google Analytics. However, before you can use this feature, you will need to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

Ivory works with the best WordPress translation plugins, so it’s a good choice if you want to add multilingual search in WordPress.

Pros:
- Live Ajax search.
- Easily change search form colors and messaging using the WordPress Customizer.
- Add an advanced search field to any WordPress menu with the click of a button.
- Supports multilingual search.
- Integrates with popular plugins, including WooCommerce, Weglot, Polylang, and WPML.
Cons:
- Ivory Search’s interface can be overwhelming and confusing to navigate, particularly for first-time users.
Why we chose Ivory Search: Although there’s a premium version, the free version is where Ivory Search really shines. If you are looking for a free WordPress search plugin that has everything you need to improve the default search, then the free download is a great option.

Pricing: The base plugin is free, while Ivory Search premium starts at $19.99 per year.

4. Advanced Woo Search

The free Advanced Woo Search plugin can look for matches in the product title, content, excerpt, categories, tags, ID, and SKU.

This can help shoppers find what they are looking for, including products they may not have found using the built-in WordPress search.

Advanced Woo Search has a straightforward settings page where you can toggle the different settings on and off, often with the click of a button. This makes the plugin very easy to set up and use.

Advanced Woo Search also shows some useful extra information inside the search results, including the product image and price. It also integrates the results into your current layout, so it will look great with any WordPress theme.

Once you have set up the plugin, it will synchronize the product data automatically. This means you won’t need to spend time manually re-indexing every time you update the product catalog. You can also add the search form to any page, post, or widget-ready area using a shortcode or widget.

Pros:
- Supports stop words, synonyms, and plurals.
- Supports multiple currencies and variable products.
- Orders search results based on where they were found.
- Easy-to-understand settings.
Cons:
- The free plugin is missing some of the more advanced search features, including the ability to search product attributes and custom taxonomies.
Why we chose Advanced Woo Search: If you are looking to improve the default WooCommerce search but don’t have the budget for a premium plugin, then this is a great option. It also supports live Ajax search out of the box, so shoppers can see relevant results without waiting for the page to reload.

Pricing: You can download Advanced Woo Search for free from the official WordPress repository.

5. SearchWP Ajax Live

SearchWP Ajax Live is an addon plugin for SearchWP, but it works with any WordPress search form that uses the built-in WordPress template tags.

This addon enhances your existing WordPress search with live Ajax search results that show up as soon as the user starts typing. This provides a better user experience and can return accurate results without even reloading the page.

Live Ajax search can improve the search experience for all visitors, but it’s particularly useful if you are selling online courses, membership subscriptions, and other digital products. By helping visitors find relevant content faster, you can often get more sales.

After activating the plugin, every search bar on your site will use live Ajax search automatically. You can also add a live Ajax search bar to any page, post, or widget-ready area using a block provided by the plugin.

If you are using a block-based theme such as ThemeIsle Hestia Pro, then you can add live Ajax search to any part of your WordPress theme.

This includes areas you can’t edit using the standard WordPress content editor, like your site’s 404 page template.

Pros:
- Works out of the box with minimal settings to configure.
- Adds live Ajax search to your WordPress blog, website, or online store, similar to the live search feature used by search engines like Google.
- Works perfectly with the default WordPress search or the SearchWP plugin.
Cons:
- This plugin works out of the box with very few settings. While this makes the plugin easy to set up, it may feel limiting if you want more advanced customization options.
Why we chose SearchWP Ajax Lite: Live search can help visitors find what they are looking for, fast. This free plugin works out of the box and automatically adds live Ajax search to all your search fields without you having to configure any complicated settings.

Pricing: Free to download from the official WordPress repository.

6. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search is a great WooCommerce product search plugin that helps customers quickly find products in your store.

It allows customers to search products by SKU, search within specific categories, and filter the results without reloading the page.

This plugin can also search content that WordPress ignores by default, including the product excerpt, product categories and tags, and variable products.

YITH WooCommerce Ajax search is highly customizable. You can include thumbnails, badges, prices, and promotions in the live search results. This can provide shoppers with useful information, which will help them decide which product pages they want to visit.

Both the free and premium versions of the plugin also allow you to customize how the search bar looks to better suit your online store.

The plugin works with WooCommerce stores in any language and is fully compatible with multilingual WordPress sites and stores.

Pros:
- Shows results in real time.
- Filter the results using categories and tags.
- Search by SKU, which is perfect for stores with big product catalogs.
- Highlight sales and promotions inside the search results.
Cons:
- Although there is a free version of the plugin, it’s quite limited compared to other live Ajax plugins. For example, the free version doesn’t look for matches within product tags and categories.
Why we chose YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search: If you run a WooCommerce store, then live search can help customers find interesting products faster. With that being said, a live Ajax search plugin is a must-have, and this plugin integrates perfectly with WooCommerce. It’s also fully compatible with multilingual websites, which is perfect if you sell to an international audience.

Pricing: Starting from $79.99 per year.

7. FiboSearc h

FiboSearch is another excellent WooCommerce search plugin. It allows you to instantly fetch search results using Ajax without reloading the page.

FiboSearch can search for matches in the product description, short description, SKU, attributes, custom fields, product categories and tags, and more.

You can also exclude out-of-stock products from the search results. This can get you more sales since you are not distracting shoppers with products they can’t currently purchase.

You can also show more content as part of the live Ajax search. For example, you might add the product image, description, and pricing to provide shoppers with detailed product information without them even having to reload the page.

When the visitor hovers over an item in the live Ajax search, you can show an add to cart button along with a quantity field and extended product description. In this way, visitors can start the purchasing process without even visiting the product’s page.

The live Ajax search bar is also fully customizable, so you can add your own messaging, change the submit button, and choose different search bar layouts.

As you make changes, the plugin will show a preview of how the search bar will look on your online marketplace or store. In this way, you can easily try different settings to see what looks the best.

When you are happy with how the search bar is set up, you can add it to any page, post, or widget-ready area using either a shortcode or block.

Another option is adding the search bar to any menu in your WordPress theme. Simply go to Appearance Â» Menus and then add the new ‘FiboSearch bar’ item to any navigation menu.

Pros:
- Integrates with the default WooCommerce search results page. This means that shoppers will see exactly the same results in both the live Ajax search and the standard search results page.
- Support for many popular multilingual plugins, including WPML, Polylang, and qTranslate-XT.
- Support for Google Analytics.
- Advanced search settings, including synonyms and fuzzy search.
Cons:
- Even if you upgrade to pro, FiboSearch doesn’t offer live chat or telephone support.
Why we chose FiboSearch: This plugin allows you to show detailed information in the live Ajax search results and even include an ‘Add to Cart’ button. In this way, you can show helpful, informative results to shoppers without them ever having to reload the page.

Pricing: The base plugin is free. The premium version starts at $49 per year.

8. Husky Products Filter for WooCommerce

Husky Products Filter for WooCommerce is a very useful search plugin designed exclusively for WooCommerce stores.

It allows your customers to filter products by category, attributes, tags, taxonomies, meta fields, and price.

Husky’s filters generate SEO-friendly links that you can add to your sitemap file. In this way, Husky can help improve your WooCommerce SEO.

The Husky search form is fully customizable, so you can display the different options as radio buttons, checkboxes, multi-dropdown menus, and more.

You can add search and filtering options to any page, post, or widget-ready area using a shortcode that the plugin creates automatically. Even better, Husky supports live Ajax search, so you can show live results anywhere on your online store.

Husky is easy for beginners to set up but also offers tons of customization options for developers who want to use the plugin in custom product templates. For example, you can create a custom woo-products loop template and html-items for the search form.

Pros:
- Advanced WooCommerce search.
- Built-in live Ajax support.
- See the products your customers are looking for with built-in search statistics.
- Support for infinite scrolling.
- The option for more advanced users to create custom layout templates.
Cons:
- Although the plugin offers live Ajax search, according to the WordPress.org listing, this feature isn’t guaranteed to work with all WordPress themes.
Why we chose Husky Products Filter for WooCommerce: This plugin allows you to replace the limited built-in WooCommerce search, no matter what your budget is. Although the live Ajax search isn’t guaranteed to work with all WooCommerce themes, this is still a generous feature to include in a free plugin.

Pricing: Free.

9. Relevanssi

Relevanssi is another popular WordPress search plugin that improves WordPress search by fetching more relevant results.

Relevanssi adds PDF indexing and searching in WordPress, so visitors can search the contents of your site’s PDF files. Relevanssi can also search shortcode outputs, custom fields, user profiles, categories and tags, WooCommerce products, and more.

Relavanssi also supports fuzzy matching and exact matches and can highlight the search terms in the results page.

All of this can help visitors find what they are looking for, faster.

Pros:
- Search blog post comments, tags, categories, and custom fields.
- Compatible with WordPress multisite.
- Useful search analytics, including most popular queries and recent queries with no hits.
- Google-style “Did you mean?” suggestions.
- Support for several popular membership plugins.
Cons:
- Relevanssi has compatibility issues with some page builder plugins, BuddyPress, NextGen Gallery, and a few more. If you do run into problems, then you can see our step-by-step guide on how to properly ask for WordPress support and get it.
- Relevanssi may take up lots of database space. With that in mind, it’s not recommended if your WordPress hosting has limited space for database tables.
Why we chose Relevanssi: Many of the free search plugins on this list are designed for use with online WooCommerce stores. However, Relevanssi is a free plugin that’s a great fit for all kinds of WordPress blogs and websites. If you run a membership website, then Relevanssi also integrates with many of the top membership plugins.

Pricing: The base plugin is free. You can upgrade to the premium version for $109 per year.

10. WP Extended Search

WP Extended Search is a lightweight and simple WordPress search plugin that allows you to easily extend the default WordPress search.

You can just go to the plugin settings and select the options you want to include in the search results. For example, you can search in the author name, taxonomies, post types, meta data, and more.

The plugin extends the default WordPress search, so you don’t need to add any shortcodes or widgets. As long as you are using the built-in WordPress search, you simply need to install and activate the plugin, and you are good to go.

If you want to offer a more advanced search, then you can create multiple custom search forms with unique settings. You can then add these search forms to any part of your site using a widget, shortcode, PHP function, or HTML.

Pros:
- Automatically improves the default WordPress search.
- Create an unlimited number of custom forms.
- Optionally exclude old content from search results.
- Show partial matches or exact matches only.
- Compatible with WooCommerce.
Cons:
- Missing some more advanced features, particularly live Ajax search.
Why we chose WP Extended Search: If you are looking for a quick and easy way to enhance the standard WordPress search, then this plugin works out of the box. Although there are some more advanced settings you can explore, this is a very lightweight plugin that’s easy to set up.

Pricing: Free.

11. Better Search

Better Search is another free WordPress plugin that automatically replaces the default WordPress search.

This plugin allows you to search across all post types, including custom post types. It will also look for matches in the title, post content, excerpt, meta fields, authors, tags, and comments.

You can also change the weight of either the title or the content based on what better suits your website.

This plugin has a unique search heatmap feature that shows the most popular searches. You can add this widget to an area, such as the sidebar or footer, to encourage visitors to explore your site’s most popular search terms and content.

Pros:
- Automatically integrates with the default WordPress search. If your WordPress theme doesn’t have a built-in search form, then you can add one by using widgets in WordPress.
- The option to use your own template file or custom CSS.
- Works with caching plugins like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache
- Create a list of stop words that Better Search will filter out of search queries.
Cons:
- No option to search based on category or product attribute.
- Doesn’t support live Ajax search.
Why we chose Better Search: Better Search provides a good range of features for a free plugin, plus some unique functionality. In particular, their heatmap is an innovative way to encourage visitors to explore more search terms and content and may make this a stand-out plugin for some website owners.

Pricing: Free.

12. Search Exclude

Sometimes, you don’t want to include all your content in the search results. For example, if you are running an online store, then you may want to hide pages like your account page, custom checkout page, thank you page, and more.

Search Exclude allows you to exclude content that you don’t want to show in the WordPress search results. You can simply check a box to exclude pages, posts, WooCommerce products, and more.

Even better, this plugin doesn’t hide your content from search engine crawlers. This means the hidden content will still show up in search engines like Google.

If you want to hide lots of different pages, posts, and other content, then this plugin also integrates with the bulk edit feature.

You can go to the plugin’s settings at any point to see all the items that you have excluded from the search.

Pros:
- A simple plugin that allows you to exclude content from the search results.
- Doesn’t affect your WordPress SEO.
Cons:
- This plugin simply hides items from the search results. This means you will likely still need to install extra search plugins.
Why we chose Better Search: This plugin does one task, and does it well. If you are happy with the default WordPress search, but simply want to hide a few pages, then this plugin is the perfect solution.

Pricing: Free.

Which Is the Best WordPress Search Plugin?

We believe that SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin for most websites. It allows you to search all the content types that the built-in WordPress search ignores by default and makes it easy to create a custom search algorithm.

After that, you can create an unlimited number of unique search forms and add them to any page, post, or widget-ready area.

Although the core SearchWP plugin doesn’t offer live Ajax search, you can easily add this feature using the SearchWP Live Ajax Search.

FAQs About WordPress Search Plugins

In this guide, we have covered all of the best WordPress search plugins. If you still have questions, then here are our FAQs about improving the built-in WordPress search.

Does WordPress have a search feature?

Most WordPress themes have a built-in search feature. However, the default search is typically quite limited and doesn’t provide accurate search results.

For that reason, we recommend installing an advanced search plugin like SearchWP.

Is the default WordPress search good enough for my website?

Although WordPress has a basic built-in search, we don’t recommend relying on it. By default, WordPress 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.

When creating the search results page, WordPress 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 will show any posts that have the matching term in the post content.

This may not be a problem for blogs that only have small amounts of content. However, this ordering logic can often show inaccurate or confusing results when you have lots of content.

For more on this topic, please see our look at how WordPress search works.

How do I make my WordPress search better?

The best way to improve the default WordPress search is by using an advanced search plugin like SearchWP. These plugins allow you to search content types that WordPress ignores by default and may even add useful features such as live Ajax search.

How do I add live search to my WordPress website?

The best way to add live search to your website is by using SearchWP Live Ajax Search. This free plugin instantly adds live search to all the forms and search bars across your entire WordPress website.

For more information, please see our guide on how to add live Ajax search.

How do I make my WordPress website a search engine like Google?

You can create your own custom search algorithm using SearchWP. This allows you to assign weights to different attributes, such as the post’s title or its tags. In this way, you can control exactly where your content appears in the WordPress search results.

After that, you can add live search to your site using SearchWP Live Ajax Search. This plugin suggests results as the visitor is typing, just like search engines such as Google.

For more information, please see our guide on how to improve WordPress search.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress search plugin for your website. You may also want to see our guide on how to create an advanced search form for custom post types and our expert list of the must-have WordPress plugins for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post 12 WordPress Search Plugins to Improve Your Site Search (2023) first appeared on WPBeginner.
08.09.2023
How to Create Advanced Search Form in WordPress for Custom Post Types

Do you want to create an advanced search form in WordPress for custom post types?

If you use custom post types, then you may want to create a form that allows visitors to search only that content. This can help people find what they are looking for and keep them on your site for longer.

In this article, we will show you how to create an advanced search form for custom post types in WordPress, step-by-step.

Why Create an Advanced Search Form for Custom Post Types?

Custom post types allow you to go beyond posts and pages and make different content types for your website. For example, we use custom post types here at WPBeginner to organize our Deals and Glossary sections.

However, WordPress doesn’t include custom post types in its search results by default. As a result, visitors may miss out on important content, and you will miss out on pageviews.

Thankfully, you can include custom post types in your search results using a WordPress search plugin. You can even go one step further and create an advanced form that searches custom post types only.

For instance, at WPBeginner, we have created custom post type search forms on our Deals and Glossary pages.

Often, this kind of advanced search form will help visitors find what they are looking for faster, which will improve the visitor experience and reduce the bounce rate.

First, you can see our guide on how to make custom post types in WordPress. Then, you can jump into our tutorial on how to create an advanced WordPress search form for custom post types.

Create a New WordPress Search Algorithm With a WordPress Plugin

The easiest way to create an advanced search form for custom post types is by using the SearchWP plugin. Itâ€™s the best search plugin and allows you to search content that WordPress ignores by default.

For example, you can make blog comments searchable and add PDF indexing and searching to your website.

How to Set 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, you must go to SearchWP Â» Settings and click on the ‘General’ tab.

You now need to enter your license in the â€˜License Keyâ€™ box. You can find this information in your account on the SearchWP site.

Once you are done, make sure to click the â€˜Verify Keyâ€™ button.

Creating a Custom Search Algorithm

Your next task is creating a custom search algorithm. It allows you to specify the content that SearchWP includes in its search results, like pages, posts, media, and any custom post types.

To get started, you need to go to SearchWP Â» Algorithm in your WordPress admin dashboard.

Here, you will see a section for every content type that SearchWP includes in its search results.

To add your custom post type, just click the ‘Sources & Settings’ button.

In the popup that appears, check the box next to each custom post type that you want to include in the search results.

After that, click on ‘Done’.

SearchWP will add a new section for each custom post type. Each section shows all the attributes that SearchWP will include in its searches, such as the title, slug, and excerpt.

If you want to add or remove attributes, then simply click on ‘Add/Remove Attributes’.

In the popup, check the box next to each attribute you want to include in the search results.

To remove an attribute, you can uncheck its box instead.

In this popup, you can also make custom fields searchable in WordPress.

When you are happy with the changes you have made, go ahead and click on ‘Done’.

You will notice that each attribute also has an Application Attribute Relevance slider. This controls how SearchWP ranks the content when building its search results page in WordPress.

If an attribute has high relevancy, then it will have a bigger impact on the search results. By contrast, content that matches an attribute that has less relevancy will appear lower in the search results.

For example, if you move the â€˜Titleâ€™ slider to the right and the â€˜Contentâ€™ slider to the left, then a post’s title will carry more weight than the content.

Every WordPress website is unique, so you may want to try different relevancy settings to see what gives you the most accurate and helpful search results.

For example, if you have created a ‘customer reviews’ custom post type for your online store, then this is important content, so you may want to give it a high relevance.

When you are happy with how the search feature is set up, just scroll to the top of the screen and click the â€˜Saveâ€™ 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 â€˜Index Status 100%’, you will know that SearchWP has added your custom post types to its search index.

Your WordPress blog, website, or online marketplace will now include custom post types in its search results.

Create an Advanced Search Form for Custom Post Types

With that done, you are ready to make an advanced form that searches your custom post types only.

To get started, head over to SearchWP Â» Search Forms and click the ‘Add New’ button.

This creates a new form, ready for you to customize.

To give this form a unique name, click on the small pencil icon next to ‘Search Form 1’.

You can now type in a name for the custom search form.

This is just for your reference, so you can use anything that helps you identify the form in your WordPress dashboard. This is particularly important if you plan to create multiple search forms in WordPress.

After that, you can choose the layout you want to use using the ‘Layout Theme’ thumbnails.

Simply click on the different themes to see a preview of how this style will look on your WordPress website.

To create a search form for custom post types, you will typically want to use either ‘Basic’ or ‘Quick Search’.

These styles don’t allow visitors to search by category, which helps to keep them focused on custom post types.

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.

By default, the form will search media, pages, and posts and ignore custom post types. To include custom post types, you need to 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 post type appears, give it a click to add it to the search.

Do you want to search custom post types only and ignore all other content?

Then just click the small ‘X’ next to ‘Media’, ‘Pages’, and ‘Posts’.

With that done, the form will search your custom post types only.

When you are happy with how the form is set up, scroll to the ‘Form Style’ section. Here, you can choose between different form styles, add a border, change the font size, and more.

Under ‘Button Style’, you can customize the ‘Search’ button that appears in the form.

When you are happy with how the form is set up, scroll to the top of the screen and click on ‘Save’ to store your settings.

How to Add the Custom Post Types to WordPress

Now, you are ready to add the search form to WordPress using either a shortcode or block.

The easiest method is to use a block, so head over to the page or post where you want to add the custom post type form.

You can then click on the ‘+’ icon and type in ‘Search Form’.

When the right block appears, give it a click.

Next, open the ‘Select a Form’ dropdown menu and choose the search form you made during this tutorial.

When you are ready to make the search form live, simply click on either ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’. Now, you can visit your website to see the search form in action.

Another option is to add the search form using a shortcode.

To get the shortcode, you need to head over to SearchWP Â» 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 on how to do this, please see our guide on how to add a shortcode in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to create an advanced search form in WordPress for custom post types. You may also want to see our custom post types tutorials and our expert picks for the best WordPress plugins to grow your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post How to Create Advanced Search Form in WordPress for Custom Post Types first appeared on WPBeginner.

17.08.2023
How to Use Multiple Search Forms In WordPress

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.

For example, if you run an online store, then you might create a smart WooCommerce product search that searches specifically for products.

You can also create an advanced search form for custom post types. For example, at WPBeginner, we have created custom post type search forms for our Deals and Glossary pages.

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 Â» Settings and then click on the ‘General’ tab.

Here, you need to enter your license in the ‘License Key’ box. You can find this information in your account on the SearchWP site.

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 Â» 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.

You can now check the box next to the different content types. For example, you may want to make blog comments searchable or add PDF indexing and searching in WordPress.

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 Â» 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 Â» 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.

For more on this topic, please see our guide on how to add and use widgets in WordPress.

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 Â» 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 Â» 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.

We hope this article helped you learn how to use multiple search forms in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to increase your blog traffic and our expert picks for the best WordPress form plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post How to Use Multiple Search Forms In WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

11.08.2023
How to Do a UX Audit of Your WordPress Site
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:
What Is UX, and Why Is It Important?

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.

The easiest way to do this is by creating user personas for your target audience.

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:
1. Performance
2. Accessibility
3. Best Practices
4. 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.

You can also read our guide on how to optimize your website for Google’s Core Web Vitals.

Google Search Console

PageSpeed Insights is a handy tool to quickly look up URLs.

However, you will have to manually run the tests, and you can’t find which pages on your website are having issues until you specifically test them.

What if you could automate this process, quickly find the pages with usability issues, and get alerts when a new problem is detected?

This is where Google Search Console comes in.

It is a free tool provided by Google for website administrators who want to see how their websites are performing in search.

User experience is an essential metric for search rankings. This is why Google wants to alert website owners when a usability issue is detected.

First, you will need to visit Google Search Console and add your website as a property. For instructions, you can follow our tutorial on how to add your website to Google Search Console.

Once you have added your website, it may take a while for Google to collect some data and start showing reports.

After that, you will see your site’s performance and usability reports in the ‘Experience’ section.

You can click on each report and drill down to find the pages where usability issues are detected.

For example, on this demo website, we found four pages in the ‘Mobile Usability’ section that were having issues.

You can click on each row to find the exact pages where the issues were detected.

Google Search Console will also alert you by email when a new crawling or usability issue is detected.

Besides usability and crawling issues, Google Search Console is a treasure trove of valuable data. To learn more, you can see our expert tips on using Google Search Console to get more traffic.

Step 3: Find the Pages Performing Poorly

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.

First, you need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. For more details, see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

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.

For more details, you can see our tutorial on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

Once you are connected, MonsterInsights will start tracking your website visitors.

Next, you need to set up the plugin to easily track conversions.

Enable eCommerce Conversion Tracking

If you use an eCommerce platform on your WordPress website, MonsterInsights can help you easily track conversions.

Google Analytics comes with enhanced eCommerce tracking, which works for most eCommerce websites, including WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, and more.

However, you will need to enable it for your website manually.

Start by visiting the Insights Â» 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 Â» 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 Â» 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.

This is where UserFeedback comes in.

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.

For more information, you can see our UserFeedback announcement post.

Step 5: Optimize Your Website Speed & Performance

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 Â» 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.

First, you need to install and activate the WP Rocket plugin. For details, see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

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.

First, you need to install and activate the SearchWP plugin. For more details, see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the SearchWP Â» Algorithm page and switch to the ‘Engines’ tab.

From here, you can adjust the search engine settings for the different content types by scrolling to the Posts, Pages, and Media sections.

Here, you can choose which attributes are searchable on your website. You can also choose their relevance.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.

SearchWP will now replace your default WordPress search feature with its own custom search engine.

For more details, you can see our tutorial on how to improve WordPress search with SearchWP.

Step 7: Test Conversion Elements

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 Â» 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.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to run A/B tests on your WordPress website.

Manually Test Conversion Elements

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.

Plus, don’t forget to test these elements on both mobile and desktop environments.

Step 8: Test User Flows to Find Bottlenecks

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 customerâ€™s journey throughout your site, including the pages and products they looked at and how long they were there.

Simply install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin.

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 Â» Addons page. From here, locate the User Journey addon and then install and activate it.

Next, you need to install and activate the eCommerce addon. This will help you track customer journeys on popular eCommerce platforms for WordPress like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, and more.

Now, MonsterInsights will show the user’s journey on individual orders. For example, in WooCommmerce, you can go to WooCommerce Â» 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.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to enable customer tracking in WooCommerce.

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.

To do that, you will need All in One SEO for WordPress. It is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market that allows you to easily improve your content for search rankings and user experience.

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.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to fix content decay in WordPress.

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.

We hope this article helped you learn how to do a UX audit of your WordPress website. You may also want to see our guide on how to do an SEO audit of your site or our expert picks for the best email marketing services to grow your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post How to Do a UX Audit of Your WordPress Site first appeared on WPBeginner.
12.07.2023
How to Sell Car Parts Online With WordPress (Step by Step)
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 a detailed comparison, please see our guide on the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

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:
Step 1: Set Up Your Auto Parts Website

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.

â†’ Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer â†

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.

If you are using a different WordPress website host, such as SiteGround, Hostinger, HostGator, or WP Engine, then you can see our complete guide on how to install WordPress for all the top hosting providers.

Now that you have successfully set up WordPress, you are ready to start building your automotive parts website.

Step 3: Choose a WordPress Theme

WordPress themes are professionally-designed templates that change how your automotive website looks and acts.

By default, each WordPress site comes with a basic theme. If you visit your website now, then you will see something like the following image.

If you want to make a great first impression with customers and get more sales, then it’s a good idea to replace the default WordPress theme.

There are lots of different premium and free WordPress business themes to choose from. You can generally categorize these as niche industry themes or multipurpose WordPress themes.

Your typical automotive website needs special features, like the ability to show listings, support for popular eCommerce plugins, and a VIN decoder tool.

With that in mind, it makes sense to look for a theme that’s designed for the car industry. To help you out, we have collected the best WordPress themes for car dealerships and the best themes for auto repair.

You can also use a website and landing page builder plugin like SeedProd.

SeedProd is the best drag and drop WordPress page builder and comes with built-in templates that you can use to create a professionally-designed car parts website.

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 Â» 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 Â» 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.

For step-by-step instructions on how to create an attention-grabbing auto parts home page, please see our guide on how to create a custom home page in WordPress.

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 Â» 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.

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin in the world and has everything you need to sell car parts online.

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.

With that done, click on ‘Continue.’

You can use WooCommerce to sell all kinds of products, including digital downloads, bookings, and WooCommerce subscriptions.

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 Â» 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 Â» Settings and select the ‘Payments’ tab.

This opens a screen with all the different payment methods and WooCommerce payment gateways that you can use.

Simply find the method you want to enable and click on its ‘Finish set up’ button.

You can now set up this payment method by following the onscreen instructions.

When you are finished, don’t forget to click on the ‘Save changes’ button.

To make the payment method live on your site, click on the ‘Payments’ tab.

Then, simply click on the method’s toggle so it turns from grey (disabled) to purple (enabled).

To get more sales in your online store, you may want to offer multiple payment methods. For example, you might accept credit card payments on your WordPress site, plus cash on delivery.

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 Â» 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.

For more on this topic, see our guide on how to add product attributes to WooCommerce.

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 Â» 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.

If you want to show multiple images, then you can click on ‘Add product gallery images.’ You can even add interactive 360-degree images in WordPress.

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.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to create a contact form in WordPress.

Step 11: Add a Navigation Menu

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.

For a complete guide, please see our post on how to add a navigation menu.

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.

For more information, please check out our guide on how to make a smart WooCommerce product search.

Step 12: Display Customer Reviews

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.

Reviews Feed Pro is one of the best customer review plugins for WordPress that you can use.

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.

For more details, please see our guide on how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to sell car parts online with WordPress. You may also want to learn how to create a WooCommerce popup to increase sales or check out our list of the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post How to Sell Car Parts Online With WordPress (Step by Step) first appeared on WPBeginner.
06.07.2023
How to Fix WooCommerce Product Search Not Working
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.
Step 1: Check With Your Hosting Provider

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 Â» 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.

To fix this issue, you will need to update the WooCommerce database. Make sure to create a complete backup of your website before updating its database.

First, head over to the WooCommerce Â» 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 Â» 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 Â» 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.

This is where SearchWP comes in.

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.

First, you will need to install and activate the SearchWP plugin. For more detailed instructions, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to the SearchWP Â» 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 Â» 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 Â» 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.

For more detailed instructions, you may want to see our tutorial on how to make a smart WooCommerce product search.

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.

Note: If you don’t know how to create tags, categories, and attributes for your products, please see our tutorial on how to add product tags, attributes, and categories to WooCommerce.

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 ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post How to Fix WooCommerce Product Search Not Working first appeared on WPBeginner.
15.06.2023
How to Create a Custom WordPress Search Form (Step by Step)
Do you want to create a custom search form for your WordPress website?

Search is how most users find relevant and interesting content on your site. If they canâ€™t easily find what they’re looking for, then they may move on to a different website.

In this article, weâ€™ll show you how to improve your website search by creating a custom WordPress search form.

Why Create a Custom Search Form for WordPress?

WordPress comes with a built-in search feature. However, it doesnâ€™t search all types of content such as comments, product reviews, or custom post types.

This may stop the visitor from finding what theyâ€™re looking for, including products they may want to buy on your online store.

You may also want to prioritize some content over others, so that it appears higher in the search results. For example, you may want to show your site’s latest posts at the top of the search results page, or display your most popular WooCommerce products.

With that in mind, let’s see how you can customize the WordPress search form. We cover a lot of ground in this post, so simply use the quick links below to jump straight to the section you want to read.
How to Customize the WordPress Search Alogrithm

The easiest way to improve the built-in WordPress search algorithm is by using SearchWP.

SearchWP is the best WordPress search plugin. It’s easy to use and gives you complete control over your site’s search algorithm, so you can help visitors find what they’re looking for, fast. It also searches content that WordPress ignores by default.

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, go to SearchWP Â» Settings and then click on the â€˜Generalâ€™ tab.

Here, you need to enter your license in the â€˜License Keyâ€™ box. You can find this information in your account on the SearchWP site.

Once you’re done, click the â€˜Verify Keyâ€™ button.

Customizing the Search Engine

After activating the plugin, you can fine-tune how SearchWP indexes, searches, and displays your content. You can think of this as creating a custom Google search algorithm thatâ€™s just for your WordPress blog or website.

To start, head over to SearchWP Â» Algorithm.

Here, youâ€™ll see a section for the different content types that SearchWP searches by default, including pages, posts, and media files.

To include more content types in the search results, click on the â€˜Sources & Settingsâ€™ button.

You’ll now see a popup with all the different content types SearchWP can search. For example, you can make blog comments searchable in WordPress.

Depending on the WordPress plugins you’ve installed, you may see some extra options. For example, if you’re using WooCommerce then you can include ‘Products’ in the SearchWP search results.

For more on this topic, see our guide on how to make a smart WooCommerce product search.

Simply go ahead and check the box next to each content type you want to include in the search results.

You’ll also notice that ‘Keyword Stems’ is selected by default. This means SearchWP may include results that don’t have the same ending as the search term.

For example, if you search for ‘run’ then keyword stemming will include ‘running,’ and ‘runners’ in the results.

This can help show relevant results to visitors, so we recommend leaving the ‘Keyword Stems box checked. However, you can uncheck it if you want to show exact matches only.

When you’re happy with the information you’ve entered into the popup, click on ‘Done.’

You’ll now see a section for all the sources you selected.

Each section has its own ‘Applicable Attribute Relevance’ sliders.

This is the weight that SearchWP will give to each attribute when creating the search results.

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 userâ€™s search results.

To give an attribute greater weight, simply move its slider to the right. In the following image, the search engine will place more value on matches that it finds in the post title, compared to matches that it finds in the post’s content.

Every WordPress website is unique, so you may want to try different relevancy settings to see what gives you the most accurate and helpful search results.

For example, if youâ€™ve uploaded your menu as a PDF on your restaurant website, then this is important content and youâ€™ll typically want to show it high in the search results.

You can also create rules that determine whether certain content is included or excluded from the search results. For example, if you have an online marketplace then you may want to exclude the account page, checkout page, and thank you page.

Simply click the ‘Edit Rules’ button in the section where you want to create the rule. For example, in the following image, we’re adding a new rule to the ‘Posts’ section.

This opens a popup where you can edit the search engine rules.

To go ahead and create your first rule, click on the â€˜Add Ruleâ€™ button.

You can now choose the content you want to include or exclude from relevant search results.

To start, open the first dropdown menu and choose either ‘Only show entries if’ or ‘Exclude entries if’ depending on the kind of rule you want to create.

You can now use the rest of the settings to specify the content you want to exclude or include. For example, if you wanted to include or exclude a specific category then youâ€™d type in the category name.

You can also type in any custom taxonomies you want to exclude or include.

To exclude or include specific post tags from the search results, simply open the dropdown menu and select â€˜Tags.â€™

Then, type in the tag’s name.

To add another rule, just click the â€˜Add Ruleâ€™ button and repeat the same process described above. When youâ€™re happy with how the rules are set up, click â€˜Done.â€™

You can now create rules for other content types such as media and pages, by scrolling to their sections and clicking on their ‘Add Rule’ buttons.

When you’re happy with how the search algorithm is set up, scroll to the top of the page and click on â€˜Save.’

SearchWP will now rebuild the index. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection and your WordPress hosting provider, this may take a few minutes.

As soon as you see â€˜Index Status 100%,â€™ youâ€™ll know that SearchWP has added all your content and rules to the search index.

Create Custom Search Forms For Your WordPress Website

By default, all the search forms on your WordPress website will use the new SearchWP algorithm you created in the previous section. This means that visitors will start seeing more accurate and relevant results straight away.

However, for even better results you may want to create advanced search forms for different kinds of content. For example, you might create a smart WooCommerce product search form that looks at particular product categories only.

You can also create an advanced search form for custom post types. For example, we’ve created a custom post type search form for our Deals and Glossary pages.

Each form will override the default WordPress search algorithm, so you can create as many different forms as you want with unique settings.

How to Create a Custom Search Form

To get started, head over to SearchWP Â» Search Forms and click the â€˜Add Newâ€™ 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. This can help visitors find what they’re looking for, faster.

Now, give the form a unique name by clicking on the small pencil icon next to â€˜Search Form 1â€™.

You now type in a name for the custom search form.

This is just for your reference so you can use anything that helps you identify the form in the WordPress dashboard.

After that, you can choose a layout using the â€˜Layout Themeâ€™ 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 â€˜Category Search’ 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 â€˜Custom Stylingâ€™ section.

The settings you see may vary depending on your theme layout. For example, if you selected â€˜Quick Searchâ€™, then the â€˜Quick Searchâ€™ setting will be enabled by default.

You can disable and enable the different options using their toggles. The preview will update automatically as you make changes, so you can see what works best for your website.

Depending on your layout and the kind of form you want to create, you may need to enable and disable some of the â€˜Custom Stylingâ€™ settings. For example, if you want to create a form that searches by category, then click to enable the â€˜Category Searchâ€™ toggle.

After that, find the â€˜Select Categoryâ€™ 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 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 â€˜Advanced Searchâ€™ toggle.

After that, scroll to the â€˜Advanced Search Filter/sâ€™ 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 â€˜Xâ€™ 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, SearchWP will search all the media, pages, and posts on your WordPress website. If you’ve created any custom post types, then you can include them in the search results using the ‘Type of search’ field.

Simply go ahead and type in each custom post type that you want to include. 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 â€˜Xâ€™ next to â€˜Mediaâ€™, â€˜Pagesâ€™, or â€˜Postsâ€™.

By default, SearchWP will show a generic â€˜Enter keyword and searchâ€™ message before the visitor enters a search query.

You can replace this with your own messaging by typing into â€˜Field Labelâ€™.

When you are happy with these settings, scroll to the â€˜Form Styleâ€™ section.

Here, you can choose between different form styles, add a border, and change the font size.

Under â€˜Button Style,â€™ you can customize the â€˜Searchâ€™ button that appears in the form.

There are more settings that you can use to change how the form looks and acts. However, this is all you need to create an advanced custom search form.

When you’re happy with how the form is set up, you can scroll to the top of the screen and click on â€˜Saveâ€™ to store your settings.

To create more custom search forms with unique settings, simply repeat the exact same process described above.

Add a Custom Search Form to Any Page, Post, or Widget-Ready Area

You can add an advanced search form to any page, post, or widget-ready area using the Search Form block.

As an example, let’s see how you can add a search form to a post. Simply open the post in the WordPress content editor and click on the â€˜+â€™ icon. Then, type in â€˜Search Formâ€™.

When the right block appears, give it a click.

You can now open the â€˜Select a Formâ€™ dropdown and choose the form you want to use.

When you are ready to make the search form live, just click on either â€˜Updateâ€™ or â€˜Publishâ€™. Now, simply visit this page or post to see the search form in action.

To add a search form to a widget-ready area, head over to Appearance Â» Widgets. Here, click the â€˜+â€™ block icon in the area where you want to show the search form.

Then, type in â€˜Search Formâ€™.

When the right block appears, click to add it to the widget-ready area.

You can now open the dropdown menu and choose the search form that you want to use.

When you are finished, just click the â€˜Updateâ€™ button to make the search form live.

For more detailed instructions, please see our guide on how to add and use widgets.

Adding Live Ajax Search to a Custom Search Form

Many online marketplaces and websites use live Ajax search. This automatically shows possible search results as the user types in the custom form, similar to how search engines such as Google work.

With Ajax live search, you can show relevant results without even reloading the page. This makes it a great choice if you sell digital downloads or physical products online, as shoppers can instantly see products that match their search query.

The easiest way to add Ajax live search to WordPress is by using SearchWP Live Ajax Lite Search. This free plugin automatically adds instant search to your website and works perfectly with any WordPress theme.

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 youâ€™ll see instant search in action.

For more detailed instructions, please see our guide on how to add live Ajax search to your WordPress site.

Using Advanced Settings for SearchWP

Next, it’s a good idea to enable some advanced settings that will make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

To do this, go to SearchWP Â» Settings and scroll to the â€˜General Settingsâ€™ section.

Here, you can activate any of the following settings:
- Partial matches. With this setting enabled, SearchWP will display results that arenâ€™t an exact match for the visitorâ€™s search query.
- Closest match. After enabling partial matches, you can also show the closest matches when a search has no results.
- â€œQuotedâ€ searches. This allows visitors to search for exact phrases using quotes.
- Highlight terms. Automatically highlights the search terms to help visitors find what theyâ€™re looking for.
Measuring Search Results and Improving Conversions

To help you fine-tune your websiteâ€™s search, itâ€™s a good idea to monitor how visitors are using the search feature. This allows you to see whatâ€™s working and whatâ€™s not working on your WordPress blog, so you can constantly improve your siteâ€™s search and help visitors find what they are looking for.

This data can even help you generate blog post ideas by showing the content that visitors are already searching for.

To see the search history and most popular search terms, simply select â€˜Statisticsâ€™ in the left-hand menu.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to create a custom WordPress search form. You may also want to see our picks of the best live chat software for small businesses and our guide on how to get a free business email address.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post How to Create a Custom WordPress Search Form (Step by Step) first appeared on WPBeginner.
15.04.2023
How Does WordPress Search Work (+ Tips to Make It Better)
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, weâ€™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:
- Page titles
- Page content
- Single-image titles and captions
- Image alt text
- File names
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.

For more information, please see our guide on how to increase your blog traffic.

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 thatâ€™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 easiest way to add Ajax live search to WordPress is using the free SearchWP Live Ajax Lite Search plugin. It enables instant search automatically and there are no settings for you to configure, so it’s very easy to set up.

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 youâ€™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.

The easiest way to change these URLs is by adding custom code to WordPress using a plugin such as WPCode .

You can go ahead and use the following custom code to replace the â€˜/?s=search-termâ€™ characters with â€˜search.â€™ Your slug will look something like this when finished: http://example.com/search/wordpress

To use something other than â€˜searchâ€™ in your URL, simply customize the code snippet below.
```
function wpb_change_search_url() {
    if ( is_search() && ! empty( $_GET['s'] ) ) {
        wp_redirect( home_url( "/search/" ) . urlencode( get_query_var( 's' ) ) );
        exit();
    }
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'wpb_change_search_url' );
```
For detailed instructions on how to insert this code to your WordPress website, please see our guide on how to change the default search URL slug in WordPress.

Make PDF Files Searchable in WordPress

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.

For step-by-step instructions, please see our guide on how to add PDF indexing and searching in WordPress.

Add a Search By Category Feature to WordPress

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.

Luckily, there are some excellent WooCommerce plugins that can show more helpful search results, and fetch them faster. To learn more, please see our guide on how to make a smart WooCommerce product search.

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.

To learn more, please see our guide on how to customize WooCommerce product search results page.

Create a Search Form for Custom Post Types

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.

This can help visitors find the right content faster, even when you have lots of different content types. For step-by-step instructions, check out our guide on how to create advanced search forms in WordPress for custom post types.

You can also make custom fields searchable in WordPress, which is ideal if you’ve added extra metadata to your pages and posts.

Exclude Content From WordPress search

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 youâ€™re running a WordPress membership website or selling online courses, then youâ€™ll typically want to exclude your premium content from public search results.

If youâ€™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.

Do you want to exclude posts, authors, custom post types, categories, tags, or even custom taxonomies? Then you can take a look at our guide on how to exclude specific pages, authors, and more from WordPress search.

WordPress Search FAQs

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.

For more information, please see our guide on how to improve WordPress search.

Does WordPress Search Include Tags?

By default, WordPress search doesn’t include tags. The easiest way to make tags searchable is by using a custom search plugin like SearchWP.

SearchWP also has a relevancy slider, so you can control exactly how much tags influence where an item appears in the search results.

How Do I Add Search to My WordPress Theme?

If your theme doesn’t have a built-in search form, then we recommend adding a search bar to the WordPress navigation menu.

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 youâ€™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 Â» 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 â€˜Browse all templates.â€™

Youâ€™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.

For example, if you wanted to add a search form in your WordPress posts then you’d select the ‘Single’ template.

You will now see this template in the full-site editor.

To go ahead and add a search bar, click on the blue â€˜+â€™ icon.

In the popup that appears, type in â€˜Searchâ€™ 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 youâ€™re happy with how the block looks, click on â€˜Saveâ€™ 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 â€˜Searchâ€™ 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 â€˜Searchâ€™ 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 â€˜Optional placeholderâ€¦â€™ and then start typing.

When youâ€™re happy with how the Search block looks, you can go ahead and either publish or update the post.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how WordPress search works, and how to make it better. You may also want to learn how to make money online blogging with WordPress, or check out our list of the best email marketing services for small businesses.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post How Does WordPress Search Work (+ Tips to Make It Better) first appeared on WPBeginner.
03.04.2023
How to Add Fuzzy Search in WordPress to Improve Results

Do you want to add fuzzy search to your WordPress website?

Adding fuzzy search helps users easily find the information they are looking for, even if they misspell or otherwise incorrectly enter their query. This improves the overall search experience and user engagement on your website.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily add fuzzy search to your WordPress website.

What is Fuzzy Search And Why Should You Add it to Your Website?

Fuzzy search looks for partial matches for a search term, even if no exact matches are available, and shows users the most appropriate results.

This way, users can find the right content on your website even if they make typos in the search query.

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 as well as look for matches in titles, excerpts, post or page content, products, custom fields, categories, tags, PDF files, and more.

For instance, if a user searches for ‘vintage furniture’ on your WordPress blog but misspells a word, they’ll still be able to find your posts on this topic.

The image below shows the same misspelled search using the SearchWP plugin.

That being said, let’s see how you can easily add fuzzy search to your WordPress website.

How to Add Fuzzy Search to Your WordPress Website

First, you need to install and activate the SearchWP plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the SearchWP Â» Settings page from the admin sidebar and switch to the ‘License’ tab.

Next, you need to copy and paste your license key and click on the ‘Activate’ button. You can find the license key under your account on the SearchWP website.

Fuzzy search is not enabled by default in SearchWP, but you can easily turn it on. First, you need to switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab in the plugin’s settings page.

Next, you need to simply check the ‘Partial matches (fuzzy when necessary)’ option under the ‘Actions & Settings’ section.

Doing so will enable the fuzzy search feature for your site.

Once that is done, you should review the other SearchWP settings for your site. The plugin comes with a bunch of powerful options that allow you to customize the search feature on your website.

You can see them by simply switching to the ‘Engines’ tab under plugin settings.

From here, you can assign weight to different 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.

To learn more, see our complete guide on how to improve WordPress search with SearchWP.

Adding a Search Form to Your Website

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 SearchWP custom algorithm for results.

However, if you have not added the search form to your website, then you can do so by simply adding the Search block or widget to any post, page, or sidebar area.

Simply head over to the Appearance Â» Widgets page. Find the ‘Search’ block and simply add it to your sidebar.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Update’ button to store your settings.

However, if you are using a block theme, then your theme 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 site editor to add the search block to your website. Simply go to the Appearance Â» Editor page to launch the editor.

After that, add the search block to your website where you want to display the search form.

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.

You can see in the image below how fuzzy search returns multiple relevant results with a misspelled query.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily add fuzzy search to your WordPress website. You may also want to see our tutorial on how to add multilingual search in WordPress and our list of the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to ourÂ YouTube ChannelÂ for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us onÂ TwitterÂ and Facebook.

The post How to Add Fuzzy Search in WordPress to Improve Results first appeared on WPBeginner.

29.03.2023