WordPress: Search Custom Post Type(s)

I’ll admit, the default WordPress search engine is not the most robust. However, there are a few ways to customize it. One of the most common requests is, “How do you limit a WordPress search to a custom post type?” Below, I explain how to display results for one post type, as well as multiple custom post types.

Limit WordPress Search Results to 1 Custom Post Type

If all you want to do is limit your WordPress search to a single custom post type, add the following line of code inside the <form> on your searchform.php template.

<input type="hidden" name="post_type" value="your-posttype-here" />

Depending on how you have customized your searchform.php template, it should look something like this:

<form id="searchform" action="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>" method="get">
	<input type="hidden" name="post_type" value="your-posttype-here" />
	<label class="assistive-text" for="s">Search</label>
	<input id="s" class="field" type="text" name="s" />
	<input id="searchsubmit" class="submit" type="submit" name="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Limit WordPress Search Results to Multiple Custom Post Types

If you want to limit your search to more than one custom post type, you have to go about it a slightly different way.

Add the following lines of code in the same place in your searchform.php file:

<input type="hidden" name="post_type[]" value="post_type_one" />
<input type="hidden" name="post_type[]" value="post_type_two" />

Replace post_type_one and post_type_two with the name of your custom post type.

This works mainly because WordPress’ WP_Query object can handle the post_type parameter as an array.

Thanks to John Sparrow for this code snippet.