Implement Google Search in your WordPress

There’s no disputing the fact that WordPress is a fantastic piece of software, but one thing it’s never been very good at is search. WordPress has provided its own search functionality for years, but the sad truth is it just isn’t up to scratch; search results are sorted by date rather than relevance, which is practically useless in sites with a lot of content. So how can we improve the search results on a WordPress site? There are plugins you can install to get better results — Relevanssi is a good option if you want to go down this route. However, if you really want to provide the best possible search results on your site, who better to turn to than the king of search – Google.

With a Google Custom Search Engine, you replace the substandard WordPress search with all the searching power of Google, but limited to your own website, so that your visitors will always get the best possible results when they perform a search on your site. To set up your Google Custom Search Engine, go to google.com/cse and click ‘Create a Custom Search Engine’. etting up the Custom Search Engine is easy. All you have to do is give it a name, a description, and tell it which website you want it to search. Choose whether you want the free or paid version, accept the terms, and click ‘Next’. On the next page, you can customize the appearance of your search results, so you can change the color of the search button, text, background and borders to make your results integrate seamlessly with the design of your site.