Are you looking for a way to add multiple search forms to your WordPress site?
By using multiple search forms on your site, you can narrow your search results to help your visitors find what they’re looking for faster.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to add multiple search forms to your WordPress site in a few minutes, with no coding required.
Since this is a comprehensive guide, here is a table of contents to help you navigate through it:
- How to Add Multiple Search Forms to Your Site
- How to Create Multiple Search Forms in WordPress
- How to Place Multiple Search Forms on Your Site
Let’s begin!
Why Use Multiple Search Forms on Your Site
There are several reasons why using multiple search forms on your site can be helpful.
First, if your site has more than one search form, the chance that visitors will notice and use one of them increases.
It’ll improve your content’s discoverability and make visitors spend more time on your site.
The longer they stay, the more likely they will sign up for your newsletter, purchase a product, or click on your affiliate link.
Secondly, you can customize search forms to meet your needs and place them in different areas of your website.
For example, if you’re an online store owner, you can create a search form limited to a specific product category and put it into a showcase blog post.
This way, you can encourage your customers to search for your products and boost your sales.
Or, if you’re a blogger, you can create and add separate search forms for pages and blog posts to your site.
It’ll help you clean up search results on your site and make it easier for your audience to find the right content for them.
Ready to add multiple search forms to your site? Let’s talk about how to do this below.
How to Add Multiple Search Forms to Your Site
The easiest way to add multiple search forms to your site is to use a plugin like SearchWP.
SearchWP is the best WordPress plugin on the market that allows you to fully customize your site’s search.
Over 30,000 site owners already use it to improve their search and deliver more relevant search results to their visitors.
Using this plugin, you can add and use multiple different search forms even if you’re not a tech-savvy person.
Plus, with SearchWP, you can make custom fields, tags, categories, and many other valuable posts attributes searchable on your site.
And that’s just a small part of this plugin’s fantastic features. You can also use it to:
- Track searches of your visitors. SearchWP collects data on what visitors are searching on your site. You can use this valuable information to get new content ideas and understand your audience better.
- Limit search to specific post types. Using SearchWP, you can make WordPress search only for specific post types or categories. It’ll help you narrow your search results and let your visitors find the right content faster.
- Display search results in live mode. WordPress shows results by opening a new separate page. You can install the SearchWP Live Search extension to show your visitors live search results.
- Prioritize specific search results. With SearchWP, you can put specific pages at the top of your search results. This way, you can promote your content and best-selling products or simply customize the order of search results.
Now that you know how powerful SearchWP can be in improving your site search, let’s see how you can use it to add multiple search forms to your site.
Step 1: Install and Activate SearchWP
To get started, you’ll need to get your copy of SearchWP here.
Next, sign in to your SearchWP account and download the plugin.
To do that, sign in to your SearchWP account and navigate to the Downloads tab within the dashboard.
Then, press the Download SearchWP button to begin the plugin’s ZIP file downloading to your computer.
After downloading, copy your plugin license key in the bottom left corner on the same tab.
The next step is to upload the SearchWP ZIP file to your site and install the plugin.
If you need help with that, you can check out the how to install a WordPress plugin step-by-step guide.
Once you install SearchWP, you’ll need to activate it with your license key.
To get started, go to your WordPress dashboard and point your cursor over the SearchWP button at the top panel.
Then, select the Activate License option from the drop-down menu.
Once you get to the License page, paste your SearchWP license key into the License field and press Activate.
Now you’re ready to move on to the next step and create an additional search engine.
Step 2: Customize Your Search Engine
To get started, navigate to the Engines tab.
You can manage your search engines, customize them, and add new ones on this tab.
A search engine is a set of rules that WordPress follows when performing a search.
You can completely change how search works on your site by customizing these rules.
For example, you can make custom post fields searchable, limit search to a specific category, and many more.
As you can see, there are 3 default search sources: Posts, Pages, and Media.
To start customizing one of them, click on it to reveal its settings.
For example, let’s look at the Posts search source settings.
Here you can adjust the relevance weights of post attributes such as Title, Content, Slug, and Excerpt.
The lower the attribute’s weight, the less priority WordPress will give when performing a search.
For example, let’s make it pay less attention to post URLs, also known as slugs.
To do that, move the relevance weight slider next to the Slug attribute all the way left.
When you’ve finished adjusting the relevance weights, click the Save Engines button in the upper right corner to save your changes.
You’ve just changed the settings of the Default search engine, which is associated with every existing search form on your site.
Step 3: Create an Additional Search Engine
If you want to add multiple search forms with different sets of settings to your site, you’ll need to create additional search engines.
To do that, click the Add New button next to the SearchWP Engines heading.
Now you have 2 search engines, and you can configure them separately.
SearchWP allows you to link the search engines you create to specific search forms on your site.
This way, you can create individual search forms with a unique set of settings and place them wherever you want.
Let’s take a look at the most common examples.
How to Create Multiple Search Forms in WordPress
Using SearchWP, you can create various custom search forms to meet your needs.
Create a Custom Post Type Search Form
Custom post types are super popular among WordPress users. You can use them to publish content beyond regular posts or pages.
For example, it might be reviews, recipes, special deals, or something else.
The best way to help your visitors find custom posts is to add a separate search form limited to them.
Here’s an example of such a form on the WPBeginner site that allows you to search for coupons:
For more information, check out our step-by-step tutorial on how to create a WordPress search form for custom post types.
Create a Category Search Form
Adding a category search form to your site will allow your visitors to choose by which category they want to search.
This way, they can get more relevant search results and find what they’re looking for faster.
For more details, see our guide on how to search by category in WordPress.
Create a Custom Page and Post Search Form
By default, WordPress performs a search among all the posts and pages that match the search query you have on your site.
But what if you don’t want some of them to appear in search results?
For example, you may have posts with confidential or paid content. Or pages that shouldn’t appear in search results, like checkout, sitemap, contacts, and others.
The best way to solve this problem is to add a custom page and post search form.
This way, you can exclude specific content from search results so that it doesn’t get in the way of your visitors.
For more details, check out our detailed tutorial on how to exclude pages from site search results in WordPress.
How to Place Multiple Search Forms on Your Site
Once you’ve learned how to create multiple search forms, let’s see how you can place them on your site.
Add a Search Form to Your Navigational Menu
The navigation menu is one of the best places to put a search form on your site.
Since this is the most visible part of your site, visitors are less likely to miss it.
Due to that, you can be sure that they won’t encounter any problems with searching for content on your site.
For more details, check out our step-by-step guide on how to add a search bar to the WordPress menu.
Add a Search Form to Your Sidebar
The sidebar is another excellent place to put a search form on your site. That’s a specific area where you can display information other than your main content.
By placing a search form in your site’s sidebar, you help visitors notice it and encourage them to perform a search.
For more details on how you can do that, see our step-by-step guide on how to add a search bar as a widget.
Add a Search Form Inside Posts and Pages
Adding a search bar to your posts or pages is a great way to encourage visitors to explore your site.
For example, if you’re an online store owner, you can add it to the showcase article.
This way, your customers can immediately search for products without being distracted from browsing the showcase.
Or, if you are a blogger, by adding a search form to your post, you can suggest your readers see more information related to the article’s topic.
For more details, see our guide on how to add a WordPress search bar with a shortcode in a few simple steps.
In this article, you learned how to add multiple search forms to your WordPress site. This way, you can deliver more relevant search results to your visitors and get more pageviews.
If you’re ready to add multiple search forms to your site without coding, you can get started with SearchWP here.
Want to let your visitors search for posts written by a specific author? Check out the how to add authors in WordPress search results step-by-step tutorial.
Not happy with the current order of search results on your site? Follow the how to change the search results order in WordPress detailed guide.
