{"id":126204,"date":"2014-03-06T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/premium.wpmudev.org\/blog\/?p=126204"},"modified":"2014-03-06T06:54:28","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T11:54:28","slug":"dont-waste-time-improving-your-wordpress-site-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/dont-waste-time-improving-your-wordpress-site-search\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Waste Time Improving Your WordPress Site Search"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’ll often find articles that start with how bad the built-in WordPress search function is (it’s not actually that<\/em> bad) and then go on to explain how you can upgrade it.<\/p>\n

While there are truly excellent search plugins out there that add a plethora of new features, you need to make sure you know why you are upgrading because it’s quite possible that you might just be wasting your time, effort, and money.<\/p>\n

\"Magnifying
Think carefully before spending time and money improving your WordPress search function<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

There is no shortage of truly excellent search plugins both free and premium that bring considerable additional features and sophistication to the WordPress search function. But whilst you can boost the efficacy of your search quite easily, you first need to ask yourself whether adding that plugin is adding real value for the majority of your visitors or whether you’re simply adding to your WordPress maintenance burden.<\/p>\n

Why Improving General Site Search Might Be A Waste Of Time<\/h2>\n

Before you embark on any updates to your WordPress site you need to assess whether they are going to give you a reasonable return on investment – not just any costs involved but also your time and effort.\u00a0And you need to be sure that you are applying the fix in the right place and that visitor usage of your site search is not just a symptom of some other problem.<\/p>\n

Before you do anything, you need to ask yourself the following questions.<\/p>\n

Does My Site Search Have Room For Improvement?<\/h3>\n

On the face of it, site search seems like a function ripe for improvement but your analytics might say otherwise. For example, over the last twelve months for WPMU DEV, only 3.1% of visits involved a site search. More interestingly, despite 30% of those searches resulting in a subsequent search, the exit rate from the search results page is only 13%.<\/p>\n

Based on these stats, it’s highly doubtful whether there’s a need to spend any time or effort trying to reduce what is already a low exit rate for a mere 3% of visits.<\/p>\n

You should certainly look to your own analytics and see just how much traffic your site search is getting and what the exit rate is so that you can not only determine if you have a problem that needs fixing but also how much time and resources you should put into that fix.<\/p>\n

\"Analytics
Does traffic to your search pages justify spending time trying to improve it?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Am I Forcing Visitors To Use Site Search?<\/h3>\n

For most sites, the use of site search is often the last resort by visitors because they have been unable to find the content they were looking for, in which case it may well be your information architecture that is at fault.<\/p>\n

You need to check that your navigation:<\/p>\n