Sarathlal N

Create custom WordPress search form in easy steps

When customizing themes for WordPress, often we want to style & use search forms in our template.

We can easily call WordPress search form in our template files.

<?php get_search_form(); ?>

This call will render WordPress default search form in our pages.

If we don’t have a searchform.php file in our theme, WordPress automatically generate a search form.

But we have limited customization option at there. So we are going to make that file manually and then style it according to our design.

First make a new PHP file inside our theme / child theme and name it as searchform. It is a clone of default WordPress search form. Then add below code in to that one.

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php echo home_url( '/' ); ?>">
 <div><label class="screen-reader-text" for="s">Search for:</label>
 <input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" />
 <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
 </div>
</form>

Add CSS selectors ( class & id ) on this form elements & then style them. That’s enough.

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