Hi!
Thank you for the proper details, and you kind words. I used both the back-end and FTP access to make adjustments. I will explain them below.
Menu home page search issue
The problem was caused by how the menu was containing the search bar. Until the search icon was clicked, the search bar was actually not present on the page. Once the button is clicked, a custom script copies the search bar to the page – however this causes a problem, as it is not initialized properly this way. I quickly constructed a custom script, which I placed to the bottom of the functions.php file in your theme directory, please do not remove it. It adds an additional script, that will initialize the plugin, once the menu search icon is clicked.
For future reference this is the custom code:
Blank area under the bar
This was also related to the menu, namely the links under the menu are styled to be 90px in height – and since the search was not initialized it was seen as an empty space.
I have placed this custom CSS to the search settings to reset the height of the ‘try these’ links:
[html].inner_tooltip .asp-try,
.inner_tooltip .asp-try a {
line-height: 16px !important;
height: auto !important;
}[/html]
How to speed up the site search?
The pool sizes are only directly related to the performance in cases where the database is huge. I recommend checking this section of the documentation, especially tips in section 1 and 2: Documentation – Search Performance
Can I get search result only clicking the search button without input keywords?
Yes, you can define the trigger actions, and the number of characters to trigger the search under the General Options -> Logics & Behaviour panel: https://i.imgur.com/MSvh7Cj.png
Is it Instant Search feature?
Unfortunately there is no instant search feature yet available.
I hope this helps!