Over the past two days, I’ve moved a lot of content to WordPress.com. Most of it has been published as pages, rather than posts. Last night, I wondered how I was going to go about making those 90-some pages of content more discoverable.
Also last night, I figured out a workaround.
You can do this in a page or post, but I prefer using a Custom HTML widget.
All you have to do—in that widget, page, or post—is create a series of links to search results within your site.
Format your links like this, where “tag” is the term you want to run a search for:
<a href="/?s=tag">tag</a>
or
<a href="domain.tld/?s=tag">tag</a>
So, for example, if I wanted to create a “tag” for “workaround” on this site, I would write this:
<a href="/?s=workaround">Workaround</a>
or
<a href="sharonda.net/?s=workaround">Workaround</a>
or
<a href="smwoodfin.wordpress.com/?s=workaround">Workaround</a>
I’m currently using relative URLs (the version which doesn’t include the domain) because the code won’t need to be updated even if it’s served from a different address, and for consistency between my primary domain and my WordPress.com subdomain.
You can see how this works by clicking here: Workaround
This workaround isn’t quite as simple as adding a tag on a post, but the method will work for both sites and pages, and it’s not at all difficult to implement.