Sigh. Confused about something that should be simple. (Using Genesis child.) As you can see from the attached images, the archive template is not being applied to the search term. It does work with taxonomy searches. What to do?
You say you tested it with twentytwenty theme and it doesn't work, but it should (I checked on my own site).
So the theme doesn't appear to be the problem, and your settings look right.
In which case I'm going to need a copy of the site for testing: hidden link
Could you please create a backup with Duplicator (or All in One WP Migration if you prefer), omitting your media uploads to keep the size down, and share a link to the backup files on dropbox or similar here (they will be hidden from other users).
You can just edit the last private reply, but I'll set up another one for you.
I now see that there is a dw... string appended to the URL you provided, and I tried that as the password on the flywheel page but it doesn't work unfortunately.
When I click the link it throws up the authentification dialog shown in the screenshot.
The username and password you provided don't work there (I expect they are for a WordPress login page protected by this dialog), nor does using flywheel as the username—which it says to—and then extracting the dw... part of the URL and using that as a password).
So I'm still unable to get in.
We seem to be in very different timezones, but from the timing of your replies I'm not sure we have anyone working who overlaps with you otherwise I would re-assign this ticket.
Maybe we can try something else.
When Duplicator doesn't work, I usually find that All in One WP Migration does (indeed, that's what I would be trying if I could access your site).
So could you try to create a copy with that plugin and share the archive with me?
Be sure to exclude your media library, post revisions etc. to keep the file size down.
It looks like the custom archive isn't being used for the search results, so I added a couple of headings to it and checked a search for 'hotel' on the front end and the headings are shown, so the custom archive is being used (screenshot).
I removed those (they mess with the layout).
The problem appears to be that some of your posts have content, and therefore include an excerpt, while many—most—do not (second screenshot).
I didn't dig too deep into why the layout is different for those posts without an excerpt, but it looks like a CSS issue related to flexbox.
In any case, the custom archive is being used correctly on the search results page.
Hmm. Relevanssi I would expect to modify the order of search results (according to its ranking) but not the content of the search results.
You don't intend to use Relevanssi anyway? Or you don't intent to use it because of this problem?
If it's because of this problem I can look into it further, because it is unexpected.
I don't have an alternative recommendation, because we have an integration with Relevanssi and hence that's the plugin we tend to steer users towards.
You would need to try the alternative(s) and see if they present any problems or not.
It looked like your posts didn't have excerpty, btw, because there is no post content section when editing them (or the ones I checked), but it seems you just re-organised the layout with a custom admin plugin.
If you want me to look into Relevanssi further, let me know and I will.
