Rewrite Search Result URL for WordPress

If you have ever done a search on a WordPress site you have probably noticed that the URL ends up looking something like this:

http://your-site.com/?s=searchterm

Even if you have set up your site to display pretty permalinks you will still get that “s” parameter in your URL. For some reason, WordPress does not rewrite the search results URL even though a “pretty” search result URL exists somewhere in the core functions.
Try typing this into your site (remember to replace your-site.com with your URL):

http://your-site.com/search/the

You will get a search results page with actual results for the search term “the.” So the function exists but the rewrite rule does not. You will need to add this function to your functions.php file to put a rewrite rule in place:

function search_url_rewrite_rule() {
	if ( is_search() && !empty($_GET['s'])) {
		wp_redirect(home_url("/search/") . urlencode(get_query_var('s')));
		exit();
	}
}
add_action('template_redirect', 'search_url_rewrite_rule');

This function will now rewrite every search results URL to something like this:

http://your-site.com/search/searchterm

I have just implemented this technique on bavotasan.com so do a search to test it out.