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Site Search Function

5 min readUpdated 7 August 2026
Let visitors search your site from a search box on any page, or from your header.
  1. 1In the editor, open Add Elements and choose Search from the Basic group.
  2. 2Drop the search box onto your page.
  3. 3In the panel, choose a Results page: where visitors land after searching.
Don't have a results page? Click Create a results page for me and Limecube builds one for you: a hidden 'Search Results' page, already set up correctly and kept out of your menus and out of Google.
If you build your own results page instead, remember to put a Search element on that page too and set its own Results page to itself. Without that, searches arrive at a blank page.

Settings tab

  • Results page: where searches go
  • Alignment: Left, Centre or Right
  • Width: Small, Medium or 100%
  • Number of results: how many appear per page (1 to 25)
  • Excerpt length: how much preview text each result shows
  • Hide on mobile

Advanced tab

  • Placeholder text: the grey prompt inside the box (defaults to 'Search')
  • Submit button: Icon only or Icon + label
  • Button label: the wording, when you've chosen Icon + label
  • Search within: Everything, Pages only, Blog only or Shop only
  • No-results message: your own wording when nothing matches

Styles tab

  • Icon colour
  • Button background and Button text: available when the button shows a label

What gets searched

Every published page on your site, including blog posts, shop products, and blog and shop category pages. Limecube searches each page's full text, plus its title, its SEO title and description, and for products the item code.
Unpublished pages are never included, and the contents of files such as PDFs aren't searched.

Adding search to your header

Edit your header, open its Search tab, switch search on and choose a results page. It then appears in your header on desktop and inside the menu on phones. Not every header design supports this: if yours doesn't, Limecube tells you, and switching to another header will enable it. See Header editing.

Tips

  • The preview text under each result is the start of the page, not the part containing the search term. That's expected.
  • Very short words are ignored: anything under three letters is skipped in multi-word searches.
  • Searching several words finds pages containing any of them, with the best matches first.
  • New and edited pages are indexed when you save them, so publish a page before expecting it in results.
  • Settings are shared between search boxes pointing at the same results page, so a header search box and a page one stay consistent. If results look filtered unexpectedly, check the Search within setting on your other search boxes.
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