How to Add Google Search in a WordPress Site

Key Takeaways

welcome to WP beginner Channel today you'll learn how to add Google search to your WordPress website we all love WordPress for the ease of use and getting a website up quickly and beautifully but when it comes to searching for content on the site the built-in WordPress search can be a little bit lacking and even though there are plugins to help with the search functionality why create the wheel when you have Google custom search that you can use in order to make this happen you will need a Google account so I'll go to the Google custom search engine and click create a custom search engine button I want to add the website address and give it a name now I just need to click get code and I'll copy the code and head back over to my site on the back end of my site I want to go over to appearance and then editor and on the right I'm looking for the search form.php file if you don't see the file on the right you'll need to create it and upload it to your theme folder via the nftp now I just need to paste the code in and click update file the next step is to go to my widget section and drag the Search widget over to the sidebar I can give it a title if I want and click save and that's all I need to do now I can view my site and you'll see the Google custom search is here now the location of the search will depend on your theme and you can also go back to your Google custom search and change the look and feel to make it look more like your site you also want to make sure you take some time to do that but that's all you really need to do to upgrade your site's search functionality now that we've covered the manual process I want to go over adding a Google search plugin so you don't have to mess with the code the plugin We'll add is search by Google so from the dashboard click plugin add new and search search by Google making sure it's the correct one we'll click install now and click okay after that we can click activate plugin and we want to add the widget to our site so I'm going to go to the widget section find the search by Google widget and drag it over to the widget area now when you see when it expands you want to make sure to add the site address this tells Google which results to bring back for the search now you can view your site and see how the search box looks and test it out I hope you liked this video and found it helpful if you did click on the like button below and leave us a comment and if you want to receive more helpful videos don't forget to subscribe to our Channel and check out WP beginner for more useful information on WordPress