Here’s how to add a search box to your WordPress menus. Many WordPress themes don’t have any native way to add search function to a menu; of course if your theme already offers the ability to put a search feature on your menus, that’s awesome, but your theme is in the minority. Why would you want to include a search feature in your menu? Well, you may want to include a search feature on your top menu so that people can easily find it. Or you may want to include a search feature in the menu which is displayed when people visit your site on a mobile device so they don’t have to scroll waaaaay down to find it on a sidebar (which gets moved below the main text in many mobile displays). All of this is possible with what we are going to tell you, and it’s easy!
How to Add the Search Function to Your WordPress Menus
The magic is in a plugin called “Ivory Search”. (Note, we are not affiliated with Ivory Search in any way, we don’t get anything from them for recommending them, in fact they don’t even know that we are recommending them, they probably don’t even know that we exist.)
Ivory Search has a lot of great features, but for our purpose the greatest one is the ability to very simply and easily add a search box to any of your menus.
Ivory Search ‘menu search’ feature
As you can see from the above image, it’s a straight-forward feature, with a few different options (fly out box, drop down, etc.) regarding how the search box is displayed when a visitor clicks the magnifying glass icon.
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This is what it looks like on the front end:
Other features of Ivory Search include that you can search almost anything (categories, tags, media, and of course posts and pages), and you can exclude almost anything from the resulting search results (again, categories, tags, etc.). You can also create custom search forms, and display them anywhere. And you can choose in what order search results are displayed, based on such criteria as author, title, post ID, publication date, modified date, comment count, and more.
So how much do you have to pay for all this yummy search goodness? Actually it’s free! And the free version has a lot of features (including the menu search). What’s more, the ‘Pro’ version, which includes some extra customizing features plus priority support, is only $19 a year. The last tier, which is called ‘Pro Plus’ and has Woo Commerce and some other integrations, is only $49 a year.
You can check out and install Ivory Search by searching for ‘Ivory Search’ in the plugin catalog through your WordPress install, or on their site at ivorysearch.com.
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.
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