Add search bar to homepage

[Ryan Hennesy]

I can’t for the life of me figure out how to add a search bar to the homepage that looks… normal.

The only thing I can figure out is adding it in a widget, but then it’s a super wide search bar all by itself. Even adding it to the footer sidebar does a weird thing where it pushes my footer content down, leaving the search bar alone on top of the footer content.

Is there a way to put the search bar either in or to the right of the header menu (at the very top) or the homepage menu (just under the slider). Obviously, I’d still want those elements, along with everything else, to scale with the width of the page window.

I’ve got the search bar in my default sidebar, so it shows on most pages, but I’ve had a number of requests to add it to the homepage, and I just can’t get one that looks good.

Thanks,
Ryan

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Ryan,

You are correct. The widgets on the home page are full width. The ones in the footer area are 1/3 width, so if you go that route, you’ll want to add three of them to keep things balanced.

There are a few plugins that will let you add a search box to the navigation menu like (https://wordpress.org/plugins/bop-search-box-item-type-for-nav-menus/). It’s not one I’ve used so it’s not a strong recommendation there.

Do be cautious with search. Unless the site has tons of content, it tends to give a negative user experience as most queries won’t turn up useful results. Thanks to Google’s abilities to find just about anything, users expect the same even if it’s not there. If you go with some search, I would also use a plugin to keep track of search queries to see what people want to know about and if their searches are returning helpful results.

You also might look at one of the mega menu plugins. They can allow you to add lots of unconventional items to your navigation including search.

Take care,
Bill

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