Custom WordPress Search Page URL Using Rewrite Rules: A Beginner Guide – WordPress Tutorial

The default url of wordpress search page may like:

https://www.tutorialexample.com/?s=lstm

It ends with ?s=keyword

If you plan to change it, how to do?

In this tutorial, we will introduce you the way to change wordpress search url.

For example, we plan to change

https://www.example.com/?s=lstm

to

https://www.example.com/model/lstm/

The full code is below:

add_filter( 'rewrite_rules_array','my_insert_rewrite_rules' );
add_filter( 'query_vars','my_insert_query_vars' );
add_action( 'wp_loaded','my_flush_rules' );

// flush_rules() if our rules are not yet included
function my_flush_rules(){
    $rules = get_option( 'rewrite_rules' );
    
    if ( ! isset( $rules['model/(.*)'] ) ) {
        global $wp_rewrite;
           $wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
    }
}



// Adding a new rule
function my_insert_rewrite_rules( $rules )
{
    $newrules = array();
    $newrules['^model/(.+)/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$'] = 'index.php?s=$matches[1]&paged=$matches[2]';
    $newrules['^model/(.+)/?$'] = 'index.php?s=$matches[1]';

    return $newrules + $rules;
}

function my_insert_query_vars( $vars )
{
    array_push($vars, 's');
    return $vars;
}

You can copy and save this code in your theme functions.php

add_action( 'wp_loaded','my_flush_rules' );

This code will call my_flush_rules to flush wordpress rewrite rule.

my_insert_rewrite_rules function convert ?s=keyword to /model/keyword.

Then you will find the effect of https://www.example.com/?s=lstm and https://www.example.com/model/lstm/ is the same.

After we have changed the url of wordpress url, we have to redirect ?s=keyword to /model/keyword/ using 301. We can use some wordpress 301 redirection plugins to implement it or we process it in search.php.