This may be a plugin or theme conflict. Please attempt to disable all plugins, and use one of the default (Twenty*) themes. If the problem goes away, enable them one by one to identify the source of your troubles.
If you can install plugins, install “Health Check”: https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/ On the troubleshooting tab, you can click the button to disable all plugins and change the theme for you, while you’re still logged in, without affecting normal visitors to your site.
See http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-deactivate-all-plugins-when-not-able-to-access-wp-admin/
Hello Steve
Thanks, we did the following:
Changed the the theme to Twenty-Seventeen
Disabled all the Plugins
Re-tested Search, however still not working.
Downloaded Health Check and ran the Troubleshooting,both in the Fontfolio Theme and Twenty-Seventeen it detected the following in both:
1. PHP Server is 5.6.5 and ideally should be running 7.2
2. The loopback request to your site failed, this may prevent WP_Cron from working, along with theme and plugin editors.<br>Error encountered: (0) cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received
No other errors reported in the Troublshooting.
The PHP version is probably not an issue, nor is loopback. Let me ask for some more eyes on this.
What does your .htaccess file look like?
http://www.underground-england.co.uk/news/?s=xxx should show a “no results found” search page.
Interesting: http://www.underground-england.co.uk/news/search/lorem works so there may be a rewrite rule set someplace that’s breaking the normal ?s=lorem redirection or you have a filter/rule someplace that’s stripping GET parameters.
More from the folks in the back room:
>>made search work using this: http://www.underground-england.co.uk/news/index.php?s=rock
>> index.php made the difference there…
>> Seen people forget to add $args to try_files in nginx cause this sort of hassle
>> he seems to be using nginx indeed: http://www.underground-england.co.uk/includes/
On the htaccess file, there is 5-6 lines of code, it does reference /news/index.php in several places.
