Disable the built-in front-end search capabilities of WordPress.
As of April 2026, Disable Search is a WordPress search plugin with 40K+ active installations and a 4.7/5 rating from 16 reviews. It has been downloaded 420K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 4.6+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2009. Download volume is stable this week. Top alternative: Ivory Search – WordPress Search Plugin.
This plugin prevents WordPress from allowing and handling any search requests from the front-end of the site. Specifically, this plugin:
get_search_form() function to display the search form.searchform.php templatesuper
Does exactly what it says. Just activate and it completely disables all default WordPress search functionality from the frontend.
In 2024, numerous bots are crawling sites, generating significant search spam. Generally, site search incurs high costs, primarily because we end up paying for CPU resources consumed by spam.
If site search is not crucial for your website, I recommend activating this plugin.
Thank you, Scott, for maintaining this simple yet effective plugin!
Simple and Very Handful
Love this plugin! Really didn’t want a search bar on my site and this took care of the problem. I have used this plugin for about a year with no hiccups at all. Thank you for developing it!
| WordPress | 4.6+ requiredTested up to 6.8.5 |
| PHP | false+ required |
…and 2 more changes
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.