Search Functionality for static Sites

Static sites are becoming more popular again. A term that is often used for such static sites is Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup Stack). Static sites are simple to host as they do not need any (complex) server processing or specific backend technologies. But that may also be a limitation in some cases.

Providing a search functionality for a static site is not a simple task. One solution may be to integrate a third-party service that indexes the site and provides results using an API (e.g. Algolia). But there is also a way to achieve search completely static.

Pagefind is an open source static search tool. It scans through a directory of HTML files and generates an index. That index is then deployed alongside a static site. Using a JavaScript API, the index can be queried and returns the suitable search results.

• https://pagefind.app/
• https://github.com/cloudcannon/pagefind

And if you do not want to implement the integration yourself, you can use the pagefind-search web component instead.

• https://www.zachleat.com/web/pagefind-search/
• https://github.com/zachleat/pagefind-search/