Field Weight

Field weight is another essential Views category that allows you to decide how your search results should be sorted and appear on the results page. Each field can be set between a value of 1 to 10. Based on the set values, the search results that match the highest field weight are displayed. 

Altering each field weight can significantly impact the search results. By default, each field will weigh 1 and each field will carry the same weight. That means that during the search, your keywords will match equally across all fields.

Consider you’ve recently published an article on safety guidelines and wish to draw more traffic from that article. 

A visitor searching for ‘safety’ is expected to end up on your website’s article. 

However, the word ‘safety’ often appears within the body text of other documents and several other pages of your website. At this point, it’s highly unlikely that the visitor finds your article and may leave your website even though he would have likely found what he was looking for. 

In this case, if the ‘title’ field had carried maximum weightage, then the probability of that visitor discovering your ‘Safety Guidelines’ article would have been much greater. Similarly, you can also add specific fields and assign appropriate weights to impact the search results.