We wanted to remove the search function on the Get Into Teaching website as this was not fit for purpose and had very little engagement from users.
Content designers had to manually enter keywords into the code for each page, based on assumptions of what users would search for.
The search logic was outdated and only considered the manually entered keywords and page title. As the content could not be weighted in other ways, the most useful page often appeared further down the list of search results.
This meant that creating searchable content was labour intensive and could potentially serve unhelpful or inaccurate results.
The search function was also flagged in a recent accessibility audit as having accessibility issues.
Creating an accessible way of searching the site
WCAG 2.4.5 requires that users can get to all pages in more than one way. If we removed the search, we would need to provide users with an alternative way of searching the site content in addition to general navigation.
To meet WCAG 2.4.5 after we removed the search function, we would need to provide either:
a link to a site map
a link to an A-Z index of pages
We decided to remove the search and replace it with an A-Z index, with a link to the index in the website footer.
Repurposing the existing sitemap
We already had an XML sitemap, but this was built to help search engines navigate the site content, so it was not user-friendly.
To make the sitemap easy to maintain and user-friendly, we created an automated A-Z index that is linked to in the website footer.
As the XML sitemap automatically generated a list of relevant pages, we used this function as a basis for the new A-Z index. The new A-Z index was rendered on the sitemap webpage as a list of page headings in alphabetical order, making it much easier to navigate.
Search engine optimisation and usability
Our content designers tweaked some of the page titles, so the titles were more descriptive for users and for search engine optimisation purposes.
The content designers also ensured that the titles were consistent, for example, they all included acronyms as users may be more familiar with these.
We have several landing pages on the Get Into Teaching website that are non-indexed. We’ve not included these in the A-Z index, as they should only be navigated from specific marketing campaigns.
We also did not include provider events in the A-Z index. The Get Into Teaching website often has up to 300 provider events at any time. Including all of these in the A-Z index would have made it much harder to use.
Next steps
We have now removed the search function on the website. We will monitor how users navigate the A-Z index and continue to iterate it based on user behaviour and needs. A future development could be to introduce a more sophisticated search functionality, for example, one that is AI-powered.