One reason might be that the amount of documentation has considerably grown over the last years - which is extremely good in my opinion. Some users may be overwhelmed and just not find the courage to delve into it.
Although this documentation is very well structured, finding something in it may be time-consuming if you have no idea under which heading it is to be found. I don’t know if that is technically possible without too much effort - but could the documentation be enhanced with a full-text search? This could help immensely if you just start with an idea like “It concerns the xxx feature, but where is this described?” The current search feature using an external search engine is not too helpful in this resprect.
@GWeck the website is hosted on Github pages and uses Jekyll to generate static HTML pages. There is no engine or backend running that could provide a search feature, which by it’s nature results in a dynamically generated page. So using the external search engine is the only option technically possible at this point.
The forum on the other hand is hosted on another server and it’s software provides a comprehensive search capability. So a possible “hack” could be to somehow mirror the documentation pages as posts in the forum. That would allow them to be searched by the forum software. Obviously this would need to be some kind of automatic mirroring otherwise things would get out of sync to quickly.
I moved your post and my answer into it’s own thread under ‘Website Feedback’ as it deserves it’s own space.
I must admit that duckduckgo always found it in the first page whatever I tried to search as I can recall, and I don’t care where it is structured (saying like this to think through for how many users this actually is important).
Also, reading several pages to check if it contain answers I’ve been looking for actually helped me to find and learn so many things I even wasn’t aware of, or thought about.