Site search on a small website

When it is not worth it

On a site of ten or twenty pages, everything is two clicks away and a search box mostly produces disappointment. A search returning three loosely related results reads as a site that does not have what somebody wanted.

It also takes space and attention from the navigation that would actually have worked. A visitor offered a search box uses it, and the result is frequently worse than the menu would have been.

So fix the navigation first. Our page on navigation menus covers what a menu should do, and a site where the menu works rarely needs anything else.

When it earns its place

Past thirty or forty pages, particularly where the pages are reference material people return to. At that size no menu can expose everything and search becomes the faster route.

It also earns its place where people arrive knowing exactly what they want by name. A parts list, a document library or a set of guides are all cases where searching beats browsing.

And on any site with location or service pages in quantity, where somebody wants their own town rather than the nearest one your menu happens to show.

What the queries tell you

This is the part most businesses ignore and it is the most valuable thing search produces. What people type is a direct, unfiltered list of what they expected to find.

Searches returning nothing are the strongest signal of all. Each one is a page somebody wanted that does not exist, which is a far better basis for writing than any keyword tool.

Site search queries are near the top of the list for usefulness per minute spent, and almost nobody looks at them.

If you do add search

The list below is what makes a search box useful rather than frustrating. A poor implementation is worse than none, because it tells people you do not have something you do have.

• Results that show a title and a line of context
• Something helpful when nothing matches
• Handling of obvious misspellings
• A box that works with a keyboard alone
• Results that are pages rather than fragments
• A record of what people searched for
• No results page that dead-ends the visitor

The empty results page

This is where most site search fails. A page saying no results found is a dead end, and the visitor who reached it was, by definition, looking for something specific.

Offer the main sections, the contact route and the most popular pages instead. Turning a failure into a route onward recovers a meaningful share of those visitors.

Our page on missing pages covers the same principle for a different failure, and the design of both pages is essentially the same problem.

Accessibility of the box itself

A search field needs a label, even a visually hidden one, so somebody using a screen reader knows what it is. A magnifying glass icon with no text label is a common and unnecessary failure.

The results have to be reachable and readable with a keyboard, including any suggestions that appear as somebody types. Those dropdowns are frequently unusable without a mouse.

Our page on accessible forms covers the general rules, and a search box is a form however small it looks.

What to do instead on a small site

Build hub pages that list what is beneath them, and link between related pages inside the prose. Our page on internal linking covers why that works better than a box.

Add a plain sitemap page listing everything, linked from the footer. It costs nothing, it serves the reader who wants an overview, and it helps anything crawling the site.

Then use the search on external engines as your measurement instead. People reach you through a search engine or an answer engine far more often than they search within your site, and that data is already available to you.