Supercharge your WordPress site search with
Better Search – a powerful replacement for the default WordPress search engine that delivers more relevant results and a richer search experience.
Better Search gives you complete control over your site’s search results. Fine-tune relevance, search across different fields and post types, track popular queries, and customise the output — all without writing a single line of code.
Make your search more intuitive and engaging with a search heatmap of popular queries, display results as users type with AJAX Live Search, and tailor the look to your theme with custom templates and styles.
Built with performance in mind, Better Search includes its own caching system and works smoothly with popular caching plugins like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. It also features a profanity filter and is translation-ready for global use.
Awesome features in Better Search:
- Automatic: Just activate the plugin and enjoy better search results right away
- Seamless integration: No need to edit any code or create custom search templates
- Relevance: Sort the results by relevance or date, and assign different weights to title and content
- Control the results: Search within title, content, excerpt, meta fields, authors, tags and other taxonomies and comments
- Popular searches: Show a heatmap of the most popular searches on your site, either as a widget or a shortcode
- AJAX Live Search: Show search results as you type in any search form on your site
- Customisation: Use your own template file and CSS styles for the ultimate look and feel
- Supports cache plugins: Works seamlessly with caching plugins like WP-Super-Cache and W3 Total Cache
- Profanity filter: Filter out any words that you don't want to appear in search queries
- Translation ready: Use the plugin in any language
If you want to improve your site search, download Better Search today and experience the difference for yourself.
Features in Better Search Pro
Better Search Pro gives you even more control and performance:
MySQL FULLTEXT indices
Better Search adds the following MySQL FULLTEXT indices to the
wp_posts table:
post_content
post_title
(post_title, post_content)
On multisite, these are added to each blog upon activation. These indices power the relevance-based search and are required for full functionality.
贡献
Better Search is also available on
Github. If you've got some cool feature you'd like to implement into the plugin or a bug you've been able to fix, consider forking the project and sending me a pull request.
Plugins by WebberZone
Better Search is one of the many plugins developed by WebberZone. Check out our other plugins:
- Contextual Related Posts - Display related posts on your WordPress blog and feed
- WebberZone Link Warnings - Add accessible warnings for external links and target="_blank" links
- Top 10 - Track daily and total visits to your blog posts and display the popular and trending posts
- Knowledge Base - Create a knowledge base or FAQ section on your WordPress site
- WebberZone Snippetz - The ultimate snippet manager for WordPress to create and manage custom HTML, CSS or JS code snippets
- Auto-Close - Automatically close comments, pingbacks and trackbacks and manage revisions on your WordPress site
4.4.2
- Improvements:
- Updated the Settings API to version 3.0.0, adding missing sanitizers for radio, select, wysiwyg, file, password, css, html and other field types, and preventing unregistered submitted settings from being saved raw.
- Added the
bsearch_highlight_use_boundaries filter to the client-side highlighter, allowing themes to enable whole-word-only matching on cached pages.
- Bug fixes:
- Fixed stopword stripping breaking with a PHP
preg_replace() warning, and silently leaving stopwords in place, when the translated stopword list or the wp_search_stopwords filter contained a /.
- [Pro] Fixed the ORDER BY clause being silently rewritten to
score DESC when full-text search was unavailable, which discarded the "Sort by date" ordering on short-term and LIKE-based searches.
- Fixed plugin data being deleted when uninstalling one version while its paired free or Pro counterpart was active.
4.4.1
Release Date - 20 August 2026
- Improvements:
- Setting defaults are now resolved from a single lightweight list instead of building every settings field, so reading an option early in the page load no longer risks loading translations too early.
- Bug fixes:
- Fixed the settings wizard silently dropping repeater field rows on save.
- Fixed settings not saving when submitted without a referer (e.g. via REST or WP-CLI).
4.4.0
Release Date - 2 August 2026
Read more in the
Better Search v4.4.0 release post.
- Features:
- Added a Feature Manager to toggle optional features from a new Features tab.
- [Pro] Added "Did you mean" suggestions for zero-result searches, with Suggest and Auto-correct modes.
- [Pro] Added search redirects with exact or contains matching and 301 or 302 status codes.
- Added search to quickly find options across settings tabs.
- Enhancements:
- Added the
bsearch_pre_index_content_parts filter to modify content before it is stored in custom search tables.
- Standardized FULLTEXT index names across database tools.
- Updated the Settings API to version 2.10.1 and refreshed admin assets.
- Bug fixes:
- Fixed settings page layout and field rendering issues.
- Fixed disabled Pro settings being discarded or remaining editable in the free plugin.
- Fixed validation preventing settings from saving when required fields were inside collapsed repeater rows.
- [Pro] Fixed the setup wizard changing steps while custom tables were being indexed.
- Fixed database checks not restoring the previous error display state.
- Fixed highlighting fallback behavior for queries containing an unclosed quote.
For previous changelog entries, please refer to the separate changelog.txt file or
Github Releases page