Hello.
While working through SEO Assistant suggestions, I ran a search on my site from my desktop and was surprised to see it was finding nothing when it should have been. No error is returned - just the message I put in the “Message for No Search Result” box in Sparkle.
I am scratching my head as to why when I have not changed anything regarding search for some time. I am hoping after describing the situation, I can be provided with a direction on how to troubleshoot.
A search through this community says to check the PHP version of my host. I did and it is version of 7.3.44 which is beyond what I saw needed for Sparkle Search (5.6.?).
Other clues:
- Search worked on mobile.
- Preview of the Search page (not of executing a search - just of the Search page) was fine.
- Search worked on my last test site (dated March 23).
As previously stated, I have not done anything to search for quite some time. The only changes to my site between March 23 and today have been changes to Page Titles, Page Descriptions, and Keywords/Keyphrase. I also changed the website address in the Settings by adding an ’s’ to http. (See Continuing the discussion from Canonical tags, Google search, and Sparkle: )
Lastly, I compared the search.php files between the current production site and the March 23 test site via BlueHost’s file manager. They are different in size (55KB vs 54KB respectively). My attempt to compare the two was not practical. (I’m not a PHP developer.) So, I took a chance and replaced the production search.php file with the version from the March 23 site. The search now works in production. (I made backups of both just in case I needed to revert the change.)
However, I am still left with the issue as to why the production search.php was not working. I only put a bandage on the problem as I assume it will resurface when I publish again.
How do I troubleshoot the issue?
Thank you in advance.
p.s. I have both the faulty production and the working March 23 versions for reference if needed.