At first pagination is everything you need to organize a website, it does the job, visitors can easily access the content on your website. But as you update your website with newer content, your website ends up having a new page once the page limit of post per page is crossed, it is easy for visitors to browse a website with 5 pages, but as time passes and new pages get added, you might end up having over 100 pages of content.

You don’t want a visitor to visit your website and browser all the 100 pages, just to get the first article or web content you had ever written or you don’t want your visitor to visit many pages to find the article they were reading earlier, it will definitely drive the visitor insane.

I had learnt this the hard way, as time passed I started having over 10 pages of content and now have 19 pages of content which is not a big number but a good number to discourage visitors from browsing pages to search content, this made users visit the site only when they came through search engine, the visitors were only interested in the content they came from search engine and were not encouraged to search in the site to get content over the same topic or search something they were expecting my website covers.

I added a search functionality that is on the top right of my website and has a magnifying glass logo, you can enter your keyword and hit enter and it will take you to a Google search page that lists content of my website of a similar keyword, This encourages users to read more content on the same topic and give a good user experience to the website.

My main motive has always been to serve quality content to users and give them the best user experience on every platform.

A simple search bar that lets you do universal search in your website is better and can save a lot of the time of the visitor, It’s not very difficult to add a search functionality to your website.

You can add Google Custom Search that will let you do in-site search, It will use Google to search content inside you website, this can be content indexed by Google bot and can get posts and pages depending on the keyword relevant to a specific post title or description, Google Custom Search performs better than the build in search feature in most CMS.

Google Custom Search can be a good option if your site is static or your CMS does not offer a build in search functionality.

Thank you for reading,

Have a question? Leave a comment below.

I compiled a list of software and services that I use to improve my workflow, here is the link to the list.

Darryl Dias

I’m Darryl. I’m a 3D Artist, Programmer and Linux enthusiast. On this site I share my insights, tips and tricks, tutorials, methods and best practices.