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Display Search Term and Result Count in WordPress

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In this tutorial we will share how you can add a simple function on your search page which will display the search term and the number of results. This feature was a special request by one of our user via email. If you want us to cover a topic, then feel free to make a suggestion.

Displaying search term and result count in WordPress search

Open your search.php file in your theme and add the following code:

<h2 class="pagetitle">Search Result for <?php /* Search Count */ $allsearch = new WP_Query("s=$s&showposts=-1"); $key = wp_specialchars($s, 1); $count = $allsearch->post_count; _e(''); _e('<span class="search-terms">'); echo $key; _e('</span>'); _e(' &mdash; '); echo $count . ' '; _e('articles'); wp_reset_query(); ?></h2>

The code above will display something like this:

Search Result for twitter — 15 articles

You can also highlight the search term by adding .search-terms CSS class to your theme’s stylesheet. Here is a simple CSS to get you started:

.search-terms {
background-color:yellow;
color:blue;
}

This is just one of the cool things that you can do for your Search Page when customizing it. You can also highlight search terms in the results, and even add a search by category feature to your WordPress search.

Source: Michael Martin

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

16 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

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  2. Aniruddh says

    Can I use this code in the sidebar.php file? As I need to show the search term and result count in the sidebar. Please help.

  3. Marco says

    thanks a lot for this snippet! :)

    according to the wp codex the function wp_specialchars is deprecated. it says that you should use esc_html instead.

    regards,
    marco

    • Marco says

      Next time I take a close look to the comments. CHADHAYTON already posted a link how you can handle it now.

  4. Henry says

    echo $wp_query->found_posts;
     
    Adding this to the top of your search page will display the number of posts found for a particular search.
     
    echo get_search_query();
     
    This will display the search term (entered in to the search box by your site visitor).
     
    timer_stop(1);
     
    This will display the time it took to run the search.
     
    All together you could output something like:
     
    Your search for “coffee beans” returned “16” posts in “0.87” seconds.

  5. Chris Murphy says

    Wow. It’s a lot simpler than that to count WordPress’ search results, here:

        global $wp_query;
        $count = sizeof( $wp_query->posts );
        echo"<pre>";
        //var_dump($wp_query);// The WP Query Object
        var_dump($wp_query->posts); // The WP Query Object's 'posts' property (note the plural)
        echo"</pre>";
    

    If you drop that snippet in your search template, it will output the properties of the ‘$wp_query’ variable, specifically the ‘posts’ property of the object. This is an array that stores a collection of the returned posts from the search query, which you can do a number of things with once you access it, including (*drumroll*), *count* the number of posts in that array using either PHP’s ‘count()’ or ‘sizeof()’ functio

    • Editorial Staff says

      Your code is cut off a little. Is there a way that you can email us the snippet and we can try it and write about it. Obviously full credit will be given to you.

      Admin

    • Ilya says

      Chris,

      This won’t work. The point is to find out the total number of results matching the query — not the number currently fetched. If there are more results than “fits” within a page, your code will only get number of elements on a page.

    • Editorial Staff says

      This code is correct. It works, the only issue he is pointing out is that it can be done differently as well. We have used this code on a client’s website and it works.

      Admin

  6. Konstantin says

    Good idea. Bad execution.
    Why in the world would you want to translate a span tag???
    And my favorite: _e(''); Huh??
    Why would you want to query the same search twice?
    Doesn’t make sense at all.

    But I don’t want to hate, this is how it should be done (in my humble opinion):


    post_count); ?>

  7. Tom says

    I really don’t give my on page search enough thought. Something like this is great because it makes the page more personalised.

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