Fix Redirection and Error Page On Empty WordPress Search

August 2, 2011 by Josh Hartman

I found out just recently that in some cases when you perform a blank search on a WordPress site you are redirected to the front page with an error message. If you encounter this issue simply apply the fix below, which modifies the blank search into a search for one space. This is enough to resolve the error page and land you on the search page.

Add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file to fix this annoying behavior:

if(!is_admin()){
	add_action('init', 'search_query_fix');
	function search_query_fix(){
		if(isset($_GET['s']) && $_GET['s']==''){
			$_GET['s']=' ';
		}
	}
}

Comments

vinhboy says
December 6, 2011 at 8:58 PM

thanks for the hint. this worked for me.
Ronald Joseph says
April 12, 2013 at 2:26 AM

Thanks Your Code Work For ME
sathish says
May 30, 2013 at 6:24 AM

Thnaks it’s awesome
Baruch Youssin says
December 15, 2014 at 7:44 AM

I want to thank you for your 2011 page on Fixing the empty searches.
It still works fine and your solution is much simpler than everything else I have seen on the net while the problem got worse as the empty search on my WP site does not return the list of all pages with their initial lines (according to the WP logic) but rather the FULL text of all posts and pages including all the long ones! (Apparently, it is a botched front page; I am using a static front page.)
Thanks!