TIL: Pagefind indexes everything, even your nav

Today I learned that Pagefind, by default, indexes the entire body of every page in your dist/ output. That includes your header, your footer, your “Skip to content” accessibility link, and any sticky-on-every-page promo bar.

So if you search “newsletter” on a Pagefind-indexed site, every page shows up as a match — because every page has the footer newsletter signup.

The fix is one HTML attribute: data-pagefind-body on the <main> (or <article>) element. Pagefind then ONLY indexes content inside that element.

<main data-pagefind-body>
  <!-- the page content -->
</main>

While you’re at it:

• data-pagefind-meta="author" to surface the author in result snippets.
• data-pagefind-filter="category" to enable category filtering in search.
• data-pagefind-ignore on anything you want to exclude (callouts, ads, etc.)

Time-to-correct-results dropped from “everywhere” to “exactly where the phrase actually appears in body content.” Worth the 20 minutes.