By default, WordPress Search feature displays published posts and published pages in the search results. Often when users are looking for something in your blog, they are most likely looking for a post rather than a page. It makes sense to display only posts in your search results. Or may be there are certain posts you want to avoid from being shown in the search results. These could be old posts, or irrelevant results.
In this article, we will show you how to make the search feature on your WordPress site more relevant, and less crowded, by excluding pages from WordPress search results. You can use the same function to exclude custom post types as well.
First open your theme’s functions.php file and paste this code, you could also create a custom plugin and add the code there:
function SearchFilter($query) { if ($query->is_search) { $query->set('post_type', 'post'); } return $query; } add_filter('pre_get_posts','SearchFilter');
How it Works?
This code uses the pre_get_posts hook to filter search results. Instead of the default condition, we have set the post_type to post. This limits the search only to posts on your site. You can also make it do the opposite by setting the post_type to pages (or any other custom post types), so it only return pages in the search result.
Nevertheless, we all can agree that the search functionality on a WordPress site is fairly limited. Instead we can add a much better search functionality using a WordPress search plugin or using an advanced search server such as Apache or Solr.
Please note, some of the links in this blog post might be affiliate links. This means if you go on to purchase a product using such a link, we receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you). This helps us support the blog and produce free content. We only recommend products we work with or love. Thank you for your support!