WordPress for Beginners: Making Your Website Searchable with Elementor

Introduction

In our quest to build a user-friendly website with WordPress, we’ve covered designing and maintaining your site using the Gutenberg editor and the powerful Elementor page builder. Now, it’s time to tackle another crucial aspect: making your website searchable. In this blog post, we’ll explore the default search functionality in WordPress and how Elementor can enhance it.

Setting Up Sample Content

Before diving into the search functionality, we need some sample content to work with. Fortunately, the Faker Plus plugin comes to our rescue. This handy tool generates dummy content, saving us precious time. After activating the plugin, we can generate a set of sample posts – let’s say, five – to populate our blog section.

Customizing the Blog Archive with Elementor Pro

With the pro version of Elementor installed, we can easily customize the layout of our blog archive page (the /blog URL). Elementor’s Theme Builder gives us a range of pre-designed archive layouts to choose from, allowing us to change the design with just a few clicks.

Selecting the Archive Template

1. Navigate to the Elementor > Theme Builder section.
2. Choose the “Archive” option and select your preferred layout.
3. Specify the “Display Conditions” to apply the template only to the “Posts Archive.”
4. Save the changes.

Just like that, we’ve transformed the look and feel of our blog page without touching the homepage. The new layout includes featured images for each post, giving our blog a more polished appearance.

Adding the Search Functionality

While the blog archive looks great, we still need to incorporate the search functionality. Elementor makes this a breeze:

1. Edit the archive page template with Elementor.
2. Search for the “Search Form” widget and drag it onto the desired location (e.g., above or below the post list).
3. No further customization is required; the search form is ready to use.

Now, visitors can search for specific content directly from the blog archive page.

Enhancing the Search Results Page

By default, the search results page in WordPress is quite basic. However, with Elementor’s flexibility, we can design a more visually appealing layout tailored to our branding and user experience goals. This enhancement will be covered in a future blog post, so stay tuned!

Conclusion

Making your WordPress website searchable is a crucial step in providing a user-friendly experience. With Elementor Pro’s powerful Theme Builder and customization options, you can effortlessly integrate search functionality and tailor the layout to your preferences. Stay tuned for more tips on enhancing the search experience and effectively marketing your content and services.