Better Search

Enhance the default WordPress search with contextual results sorted by relevance

Features overview

Improve the default WordPress search with more relevant results in minutes

Quick install

Installing the plugin is extremely simple. Search for Better Search in your Plugins » Add New screen and hit Install Now. The plugin will automatically replace the inbuilt WordPress search to return relevant results rather than results sorted by date.

Seamless integration

Better Search will cleanly integrate with your WordPress theme. And, if you’re looking for more customisation, you can disable seamless integration and create your own template.

Inbuilt cache

Better Search comes with its own cache to reduce those precious database calls. This means that installing this plugin will not slow your site down. Just turn the cache ON under General Options on the plugin settings page.

Additional features and benefits

If you prefer more control over where the plugin appears on your site, then we have you covered.

Shortcode

Display the popular search terms anywhere within your post or page content with a simple shortcode with its own set of arguments

Custom CSS Styles

You can easily change the display of the search results by using your own custom styles

Relevance based search results

Search results are automatically sorted by relevance. You can also turn off relevancy based searching, in which case, results are sorted by date

Customisable output

Display author, excerpt or date or change the HTML markup from the default ul and li tags.

Profanity filter

Customise the list of stop words that will automatically be filtered out of search queries

Widget

Display the popular search terms in your sidebar or footer. If your theme supports it, then just drag and drop the widget

Admin interface

Better Search allows you to view the popular search terms in a clean tabular format

Fine-tune the results

Change weighting of post title and post content. Turn on BOOLEAN search to override the default NATURAL LANGUAGE search of mySQL

Custom API

Advanced users and developers can take advantage of the easy to use plugin API for custom layouts

Developer friendly

Better Search has tonnes of actions, filters, and smart coding making it a developer-friendly plugin

8,000+ installs and counting

Better Search has been downloaded over 125k times and is used on over 8,000 blogs

And, the 4.5 out of 5 stars rating tells you how much our users love this plugin and here’s some of what they are saying…

Thank you for this amazing plugin. Before it, search results were a big zero. After trying different plugins without success, at last this plugin is a blessing. Not only it finds everything in almost no time, but it intergrates with my theme and gives a very beautiful page of results.

yannis7

Out of the box, this plugin worked fine but the search page didn’t quite fit with my theme. I disabled the “seamless integration” and started fiddling around with the options to get better results, hide featured images, and fix the search results display. That last was the trickiest and required a search of the support forum followed by some experimentation. Fortunately there’s a custom CSS box in the configuration settings, so I kept playing until I got what I needed.

cah329a

This is a terrific plugin. I was having a very hard time with WP default search engine getting relevant results for phrase searches like “%find this phrase%”. I did a lot of PHP tweaks to test various solutions out. Then I purchased and tested out some so-called premium plugins that took hours to configure and still the results were only marginally better. To my complete surprise, in less than 5 minutes after installation Better Search was returning those elusive phrase matches with outstanding priority. The developer should charge for this plugin, it deserves to be a paid plugin. Instead, he only accepts donations right now. Naturally I was more than happy to donate and support his efforts.

mqfell

This plugin is essential for every WordPress site. I think that this is how WordPress’s default search should work – search 1000 posts, here are the 4 you might want.
A big Thank you to developer!

belzemut

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