Site Search Issues

Can you provide the link to your site and a specific example of a search term that isn’t showing up, and the page where that search term shows up?

Thank you kindly for chiming in Matt. Unfortunately the site is still being developed and isn’t live yet so I can’t provide you URL yet. But I am using the Easy Digital Downloads plugin and we are creating what is known as Download posts, if you are familiar with that plug-in?

In case you are not, a Download Page created by that plugin looks exactly like a regular Blog post window, but it is different in the sense that you can add in products and pricing to the post for selling digital products.

What I realized though is that the search results on the site will provide the correct results on search terms if the word appears either in the title of the Download post or within the body of the post. But if the keyword being searched is a Tag then it doesn’t show up in the search results for some reason. So this is the problem I think and I have managed to at least isolate the issue a bit further.

Is there any reason why the search on the site would ignore tags and only look at titles and text in the body when showing results for Download posts?

Many thanks again Matt.

I cannot tell you exactly why this is happening, but I can tell you how I’ve dealt with similar issues in the past. I installed the Relevanssi plugin and it essentially fixed all my search issues. Others will likely have different suggestions, but this worked for me.

Thank you MBWD. Wow, excellent. I put that in and it did fix the problem. I must say that the settings page for that plugin and all of its options are a bit overwhelming and I am not sure I set everything perfectly or correctly, but at least my searches are working based on Tags now too, which is what is most important for the time being. So cheers for that.

If there is another solution though that can fix the underlying problem I am still willing to try other things too.

Thanks again.

Glad it worked for you. I usually just leave all the settings the way they are, except down near the bottom make sure to check off all the types of data you want to be searchable.

I talked to a theme designer and he told me that Search is the default WordPress search. Out of the box it searches only the titles and the content. So he also suggested that Relevanssi is the solution. Seems it is not that it is broken. It just wasn’t designed to search Tags on custom themes. I think I will mark this topic as resolved now and thank you again for your help.