An empty search box is an open question, and most visitors answer it badly. Suggesting a few terms turns it into a menu.
The Search Bar can attach a suggestion list to the input, showing the keywords you choose as the visitor starts typing.
For every Search Bar setting in one place, see the Search Bar guide.
Before You Start
- Edition: Free. Measured with Nexter Blocks Pro deactivated, the Search Bar renders identically — form, input, dropdowns, suggestions and results all work without Pro.
- Block to enable: Search Bar, switched on under Nexter > Blocks in your WordPress dashboard.
- A list of keywords worth suggesting. Your analytics search terms, or the questions support answers most often, are the usual source.
Steps
- Select your Search Bar block and turn on the suggestions option.
- Enter your keywords separated by the pipe character, then publish.
The separator is the pipe character. Commas are treated as part of the keyword, so a comma-separated list becomes one long suggestion rather than several.
How It Behaves
- It renders a native HTML suggestion list. Measured: the block outputs a
datalistbound to the search input, with one option per keyword. - The split is on the pipe character. Measured: a three-keyword string separated by pipes produced exactly 3 options.
- Whitespace around each keyword is trimmed, so spacing your list out for readability is safe.
- The browser does the filtering. As the visitor types, the browser narrows the list itself, with no request to your server.
- These are static suggestions, not live popularity data. The block does not track what people search for; you choose the list.
Limitations
- It is not a most-searched list. Despite the name, nothing is measured or ranked. The keywords are the ones you type in, and you have to update them yourself.
- The appearance is the browser’s, not yours. A native suggestion list cannot be styled, and it looks different in each browser.
- Some mobile browsers show it inconsistently, or not at all.
- Suggesting a keyword does not guarantee results. If nothing on your site matches it, the visitor picks it and gets nothing, which is worse than no suggestion. Test each one.
- Long lists are unhelpful. The list is a shortcut, not a sitemap.
Troubleshooting
No suggestions appear
Check the option is on and the keyword field is not empty. Also try a different browser, since native suggestion lists are rendered by the browser itself.
All my keywords became one suggestion
They were separated with commas. The separator is the pipe character.
A suggested keyword returns nothing
Search for it yourself and confirm it matches something. By default only titles are searched, so a keyword that appears only in body copy will come back empty.
