Plugins
Site search
The search box on your website, and the one switch that controls it.
Your website has a search box. Visitors type in it and find your pages. This screen holds the one switch that turns it on and off.
Where to find it
This one has no menu item of its own.
- Go to Admin, then Plugins.
- Find the row named
site-search. - Click the gear icon at the end of that row.
The heading reads “site-search Settings”. The Plugins page explains the rest of that screen.
The one switch
Show site search is on when your website is built. Leave it on and there is nothing to do here.
Warning
There is no Publish step here. You click Save Settings, and the change is on your live website right away.
What visitors get
The search box sits in the slim bar above your header. It says Search… until someone types. That bar is set up on the Utility Bar page, which decides where the search box goes.
Results start to appear while they type. Press Enter and the full search page opens instead. On a phone, the search icon in the bar at the bottom opens that same page.
What can be found
Search looks through this content:
- your pages
- your services
- your service area pages
- your photo albums
- your team members
- your branches, if you have any
Some websites have more. Products, food menus, projects, and blog posts are searched too, on the sites that have them. On a site with a shop, the full search page also lists matching product tags first.
Only published content is found. A draft is never in the results, and neither is anything in the Trash. Saving and publishing covers the difference.
Turning it off
Search earns its keep on a website with a lot of pages. On a small website of five or six pages, it can be more clutter than help.
Switch Show site search off and click Save Settings. Three things go away at once:
- the search box in the header bar
- the search box in the footer
- the search box on the “page not found” screen
- the search box in the side rail of blog posts and projects
The full search page stops working too. A visitor who saved a link to it gets the “page not found” screen.
Nothing is deleted. Your pages are all still there, and every menu link still works. Switch it back on any time and the boxes come back.
Last updated Oct 20, 2026