Placing a search field within the site is a good practice that helps visitors reach the desired content quickly. Therefore, adding more optimization to your site’s search feature is a decision that improves the user experience and increases the rate of users remaining on the site.
Through this article, we will learn about Live Ajax Search, why you need it, and how to add it to your WordPress site.
What is Live Ajax Search?
As long as you have used the Google search engine, you have certainly seen Live Ajax Search. It is a feature based on auto-completion to predict the words and phrases that the user enters. That is, it helps the user access the content he wants without remembering the entire title of the article, page, category, or products.
We find it usually used in software that contains a lot of similar content, such as search engines and browsers to search for pages, sites, and e-mail to complete e-mail addresses, and it looks like this:
The importance of Live Ajax Search
There is no doubt that there is great importance for Live Ajax Search because it enables automatic search engines that improve the user experience , and reduce the texts that users enter into the search field.
In addition, if the user does not find the content he is looking for, he will learn about other content or products that are automatically suggested when entering words. This, in turn, will increase sales and time on the site, which reduces the bounce rate .
It is also important to improve navigation within the site compared to traditional search, which forces the user to remember and enter all the text.
How to Add Live Ajax Search in WordPress
By default, WordPress does not allow it. It enables you to have a search field, but it does not contain automatic search capabilities. However, to make this feature we will rely on an external add-on, which is the SearchWP add-on . It has received many installations from website owners with a positive rating and comes with a free version that allows you All the features you need as a WordPress website owner.
There are a host of customization features so you can add the search field to your preferred location, archive content, products, and more. Now let’s start learning how to add Live Ajax Search in WordPress.
First, you must install the plugin by going to the WordPress control panel, then click on Plugins > Add New and search for the plugin by its name by typing SearchWP. Then install and activate it. Read also: How to install and activate a WordPress plugin correctly.
Now, in this step you will be able to add Live Ajax Search to your WordPress site with ease, and there are many places where you can add the search right, and we will be able to add it in more than one place as follows:
Add Live Ajax Search to sidebar
The sidebar is a great place to insert a search box, because it enables users to search for the content they want, no matter where they are on the page, whether at the beginning, middle, or end.
In order to be able to add the search field there, you will have to go to the WordPress control panel and then go to: Appearance > Widgets
After that, the settings and options will differ depending on your template. In the template used in this explanation, you will find that there are many places where it is possible to add the search field. At the same time, there are templates that do not provide all of these options or do not support the sidebar originally.
You must select the place where you want to add Live Ajax Search, click on the + sign , and then search for SearchWP Live Search. The option to add a search field will appear. Click on it. Then don’t forget to click Update at the top.
After that, the search field will be added to look like this:
Add Live Ajax Search to a post or page
Sometimes there is a page or article to which you want to add a search field, and you can do so by going to the article or page, then clicking on the + sign , searching for the word search and clicking on the option that appears to you, and then clicking on Update at the top.
To look like this:
It is worth noting that it is possible to add Live Ajax Search to the header or the top of the site, by adding a search field widget. But if the template supports this.
Thus, you have learned how to add Live Ajax Search in WordPress using the SearchWP plugin in the free version. It is worth noting that the paid version of the add-on allows you to customize the search options, to show products, files, tags, classifications, etc., and also allows you to modify the search algorithms and access a set of statistics about searches.
