Do you want to learn how to exclude pages from the WordPress search results?
By default, the internal search on your WordPress site will include all posts and pages in the search results. To make it easier for your site visitors to find what they’re looking for, you may want to exclude certain content, so it never appears in those results.
In this article, we’ll show you how to exclude certain pages from the WordPress search results, step by step.
Why Exclude Pages from WordPress Search Results?
The default WordPress site search includes all of your posts, pages, and custom post types in the search results. This works well enough for many WordPress website owners.
However, if you’re running an online store, then you may want to hide pages like your account page, checkout page, thank you page, and more.
The same goes for those running membership websites or online courses. You may want to hide subscriber-only content from appearing in search.
With that said, let’s show you how to exclude pages from your sitewide WordPress search results.
Note: This guide covers on-site search results, when a visitor to your website uses a search box to search through your website content. If you’re looking to exclude pages from Google search results, then you should see our guide on how to hide a WordPress page from Google.
Create a New WordPress Search Algorithm with a WordPress Plugin
The easiest way to exclude pages from the WordPress search results is by using the SearchWP plugin. It’s the best search plugin for WordPress used by over 30,000 websites.
It’s very easy to use and gives you complete control of your WordPress search results.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, navigate to Settings » SearchWP and then click the ‘License’ menu option.
Then, you can enter your license key into the ‘License’ box and click the ‘Activate’ button. You can find this information in your account on the SearchWP website.
After that, you need to click on the ‘Engines’ menu option.
This takes you to a page where you need to set your default search engine settings. Think of it like creating your own Google search algorithm that’s only for your website.
With SearchWP, you need to create a sitewide search engine before you can start excluding pages from the WordPress search results.
You can change the search engine settings by clicking on the ‘Posts’, ‘Pages’, ‘Media’, and other custom post type drop downs.
Each section has a weight multiplier that will change how the search engine ranks your website’s content.
For example, if you move the ‘Title’ slider down and the ‘Content’ slider up, then the content will hold more value than the title.
You can also completely remove all pages from appearing in the WordPress search here.
Simply click the ‘Remove’ button in the ‘Pages’ section.
This brings up a popup where you need to uncheck the ‘Pages’ box.
Then, click the ‘Done’ button to remove all pages from appearing in search.
After you’re done customizing the default search engine settings, you need to click the ‘Save Engines’ button to create your first engine.
Exclude Specific Pages From the WordPress Search Results
If you only want to exclude specific pages from the search results on your website, then this section is for you.
To do this, we’ll be using the Exclude UI extension from SearchWP. When you’re logged into your SearchWP account, go to the Exclude UI download page and click ‘Download Extension’.
Then, install and activate the extension as you would any other WordPress plugin.
After that, open up the page that you want to exclude from the search results.
Next, make sure the ‘Page’ option is selected in your right hand menu, and simply check the ‘Exclude from search’ checkbox.
Then click the ‘Update’ button, and that page will now be
hidden from the search results. Even if your visitors enter the exact title of the page into your search bar, it will not appear.
If you want to hide more individual pages from the search results, then simply follow the above steps again.
To exclude specific blog posts from WordPress search results, you can follow the same steps above. The only difference is that the right-hand menu will say ‘Post’ instead of ‘Page’.
We hope this article helped you learn how to exclude pages from the WordPress search results. You may also want to see our beginner’s guide on how to get a free SSL certificate for your website and our best business phone services for small businesses.
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Thanks a lot! Seems to work perfectly.
Glad our guide was helpful
just what I needed, at the right time
thanks
Glad our guide could help
Thanks. This worked for me. I wanted to exclude gallery appears in search results and this code does exactly what I need. Thanks
This is really basic. It would be nice to see how to exclude only particular page templates, or blog categories.
You are true life savers. always.
Hello team WPBeginner
I am facing a new problem
when I have tested crawled pages on Google by writing
site:example.com
Then it showing pages & posts properly but also showing pagination links
example.com/page/2/
Like this
So how can I avoid this?
Please help me.
Thanks! :)!
Wondering if there’s a way to target different search forms with this technique. I’d like the main website search form to target pages only; and the blog search form to target posts only.
I have some pages that are password protected (via main WP option to password protect a page) but they are still showing up in WP search with the excerpts. My understanding is that by default, the excerpts should not appear, you should see “There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.” I can use the Simply Exclude plugin but I’m wondering why the excerpts are showing up in the first place and I’d rather not add another plugin if I don’t have to.
Thank you very much sir.. this post really help me.. you rock man .. !!
Thank you very much. You guys did the trick. I was looking for this and couldn’t find it anywhere else.
Nice job, guys.
When someone just hits SEARCH with the criteria being ‘blank’, ALL pages show up in the results. How can I have NO results show in this situation?
Noah, if you are saying about search result, you can validate the search form using javascript. So that people are forced to key in the words before do the searches.
Thanks bro.
Glad to hear. You are welcome.
Thank you so much for the article and some comments with codes that helped me a lot!
Worked perfectly, Thanks alot
Work Fine !
Thanks bro! Your code helped me a lot.
This worked much better than passing a hidden field (which is what I’ve been doing).
This worked great, thanks! How can I include WordPress Native BBPress forum topics in the search results?
Thanks,
L
You can try bbpress search plugin.
Hi! I would like to ask how do i exclude the specified pages i wanted to excluded from searches? And how do i know what is the ID of the page? Can someone tell a solution? I wanted to excluded some pages which are useless to visitors.
Thank you!
works for me. thank you!
You are a real life saver. I tried codes from WordPress forum but didn’t work out. Yours is working for me!
Well just wanted to say thank you for this… wonderful article
Can you alter this function to exclude specific pages/posts from search? Ive been searching for this functionality and havent found anything.
Perfect! I was expecting it to be a bit more complex than that. Thanks a ton!
Thank you so much. This was super helpful, fixing my problem with the speed of a cut and a paste (and a test)..
Success in all your ways!
Michael.
Well, that’s almost perfect. I searched and found that many site’s offering us to hardcode the category ids to search id but this is cool. One question, i have to do the pagination myself so when i add this filter i won’t get offset issues .. right?
No, you should not have offset issues.
Hi
may I put your tutorials in my blog with a link to wpbeginner.com? my blog is in Farsi and I think many persian users need these tips.
thanks a lot
No you may not translate any of our tutorials entirely. You may write a summary and then link to our site.
This hack excludes not only pages from search results, but also other custom post types. So if we have many custom post types in our WP site, we can put them in the statement like this:
$query->set(‘post_type’, array(‘post’, ‘custom-post-type’));
Thanks Rilwis, just what i needed!