There are times when searching a WordPress blog, you only get one item in the result. Depending on how organized your site is, this should be the item the user was looking for anyways. One of our users asked if there was a way to redirect to the post if the search query results only one match. In this article, we are going to show you how to redirect users to the post when the search query only returns one match.
All you have to do is open your theme’s functions.php file and paste the following snippet.
add_action('template_redirect', 'one_match_redirect');
function one_match_redirect() {
if (is_search()) {
global $wp_query;
if ($wp_query->post_count == 1) {
wp_redirect( get_permalink( $wp_query->posts['0']->ID ) );
}
}
}
Now you must beware that some users will not expect this functionality. So it may freak them out.
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Casey Lessard says
Worked for me. I run a local search engine using WordPress and I have been trying to find this solution for some time. Does exactly as described. Thank you so much!
Eric says
I want to make it so when some searches a specific phrase it redirects to an easter egg, like if someone searches “I see dead people” specifically it’ll redirect them to a URL I can define.
Nebulas Website Design says
Thanks for this piece of code it made my client very happy and I didn’t thnk it could be done. However it’s not working for us we are using the Relevanssi search plugin should it work with this?
carlos says
What if I want to redirect any search query to the most relevant post no matter what the number of posts the search returns? I’d really like to be able to do that.
Editorial Staff says
Get rid of the if conditional from the code above, and it should do it.
Admin
CalebZahnd says
This is handy. Thanks!