Searching in menus for pages is never reliable

  • I’ve noticed this for a while, but after fiddling with a menu on a site with almost 1,500 pages I’ve decided it was worth reporting to see if there’s a fix or if this is a known issue.

    Basically, the page search inside Appearance > Menus is almost never reliable if you have a site with lots of pages on it. For instance:

    On this lawyer site I am working on, I am trying to add a “Hit and Run” page to the menu. Since I don’t want to go through 20-30 links in the “View All” tab of the “Pages” in the menu sidebar, I click “Search” and type in “Hit and Run”.

    Here’s what shows up:
    Wrongful Death
    Truck Injury Attorney
    A few location pages

    … none of which have “Hit” or “Run” in them. Certainly not the phrase “Hit and Run”.

    The page I am looking for literally has the title “Hit and Run” and a page slug of “hit-and-run”. Am I doing something wrong or is there a secret to getting the right page in search so I don’t have to navigate through “View All”?

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Part of the issue is the search also searches content for matches, not just titles. It also logically ANDs every search term, so searching hit and run brings up posts with and in content. Stick with searching for less common words, unless your search terms are within quotes so that the entire phrase must match.

    The other issue is the returned hits are listed in reverse chronological order, and the number of hits displayed are limited. So searching for common words will mean older pages with those words will fall off the bottom of the list.

    Try searching for “Hit and Run” (including quotes) or just hit run. If you can think of a unique phrase within the page content and search for that within quotes, it will severely limit hits so the older page doesn’t fall off the bottom of the list.

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