The article is not showing up in website search results. Why?

A client, the owner of a large blog website fully built on Webflow, reached out to us with a request to check their website's search functionality. Some blog posts were not appearing in search results, and they wanted to understand why.

The Context

We're talking about in-site search functionality, not Google search results or any external search engine. Site search allows visitors to find information within the website itself. Whenever you see on a website a search icon 🔎 and a search bar, that's an indicator that site search is enabled.

For content-heavy websites, such as blogs or knowledge bases, site search is crucial. Webflow’s site search is available on all CMS Site Plans and above, but not all websites have it enabled. In this case, the client had search functionality enabled, and it was heavily used by their visitors.

Troubleshooting the Issue

The first step in troubleshooting site search is ensuring that all relevant pages are included in search results. By default, pages are included, but they can be manually excluded.

The second step is checking when the site was last indexed.

What Is Indexing and How Does It Work?

Indexing determines which content appears in search results. Once a CMS Site Plan or higher is activated, Webflow creates a search index after the site is published for the first time. Webflow updates the index in two ways:

1. Manual Reindexing

Manual reindexing allows users to refresh the search index on demand. This is useful when significant updates have been made.

• CMS Site Plan: Manual reindexing is available once every 24 hours.
• Business Site Plan: Manual reindexing is available every 12 hours.

If urgent reindexing is needed, Webflow Support can manually trigger it as a one-time courtesy, so just contact a support team.

2. Automatic Reindexing

Automatic reindexing happens periodically:

• CMS Site Plan: Reindexing occurs 72 hours after a full-site publish.
• Business Site Plan: Reindexing occurs 12 hours after a full-site publish.

However, publishing a single CMS item does not trigger automatic reindexing—a full-site publish is required.

The Client’s Issue

Our client’s editorial team publishes multiple blog posts daily using Webflow’s in-CMS publishing functionality. When we checked the indexing history, we found that the last reindexing occurred several days ago, when our team made a technical update and republished the full site.

Since indexing hadn’t been triggered since then, the most recent blog posts were not included in search results—even though the search itself was working correctly.

The Solution

We advised our client to perform a full-site publish at the end of each day to ensure indexing is triggered regularly.

At Rapid Fire, we hope Webflow will eventually allow indexing to be triggered automatically after CMS item publishing, making search results more up-to-date without requiring a full-site publish.