Description
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:
- 🗄️ Efficient Content Storage and Indexing
- 🔍 Multisite Search
- ✨ Fuzzy Matches
- 🎯 Relevance Threshold
- 🔗 Search Post Slugs
- ⚙️ REST API Integration
- 🔄 LIKE Fallback Search
- ⚖️ Advanced Relevance Weighting
MySQL FULLTEXT indices
Better Search adds the following MySQL FULLTEXT indices to the wp_posts table:
post_contentpost_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.
Contribute
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
Multilingual sites
Better Search supports WPML and Polylang and detects TranslatePress’s current language when caching search results. Caches are separated by language so results from one language are not reused in another.
TranslatePress translates the displayed results with the rest of the page; it does not create a separate search index of translated text. Better Search Pro’s core WordPress REST search responses and live-search suggestions are translated using the active TranslatePress language.
Search-term highlighting can prevent TranslatePress from translating a complete title because it splits the text with markup. Disable search-term highlighting if translated titles remain in the default language.
Screenshots
Installation
WordPress install
Navigate to Plugins within your WordPress Admin Area.
Click “Add new” and enter “Better Search” in the search box.
Find the plugin in the list (usually the first result) and click “Install Now”.
Manual install
Download the plugin
Extract the contents of better-search.zip to wp-content/plugins/ folder. You should get a folder called better-search.
Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.
Goto Settings > Better Search to configure
FAQ
If your question has not been covered here, please create a new post in the WordPress.org support forum. I monitor the forums regularly. If you want more advanced paid support, please see details here.
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Will this work with any WordPress theme?
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Yes! It replaces the default WordPress search and integrates with most themes out of the box.
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Does it support WooCommerce or custom post types?
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Yes, you can enable searching in any public post type from the settings.
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How does it affect performance?
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Better Search uses MySQL FULLTEXT indexes and includes internal caching. It also works well with external caching plugins.
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Can I customise the search results template?
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Yes, you can override the results template by copying the file to your theme directory. More info in the documentation.
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What is the Profanity Filter?
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It filters out selected keywords from being searched. Handy for family-safe sites.
Better Search includes a very cool profanity filter using the script from Banbuilder. You can customize which list of words you want to filter out from the Better Search settings page. Find the setting called “Filter these words:”. The plugin will automatically strip out partial and complete references to these words. You can turn the filter off by emptying the list.
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How can I report security bugs?
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You can report security bugs through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team help validate, triage and handle any security vulnerabilities. Report a security vulnerability.
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“Better Search – Relevant search results for WordPress” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Better Search – Relevant search results for WordPress” has been translated into 3 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Better Search – Relevant search results for WordPress” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
4.5.0
Release date: 2 October 2026
Release post: https://webberzone.com/announcements/better-search-v4-5/
Added
- Added WordPress Abilities API support for site searches, with an option to disable it in the Features tab.
- Added a Status section to Tools showing database, index and cache health.
- Added a setting to restrict search results to selected terms.
- Added
*wildcard support to filtered words, sospam*also blocked “spammer”. - Added translated titles and language-specific links to TranslatePress live-search suggestions.
- Added the
data-bsearch-live-search="off"form attribute, so forms with their own live search did not show a second list of suggestions. - [Pro] Added abilities for popular search terms, spelling suggestions and cache clearing.
- [Pro] Added optional AI answers grounded in Better Search results, with source links, cached answers, usage limits and a Content gaps report.
- [Pro] Added WP-CLI commands for AI questions, answer-cache management and Content gaps.
- [Pro] Expanded Tools status with custom-table and AI-provider health.
- [Pro] Added optional recency weighting, disabled by default; existing custom-table indexes required a one-time backfill from Tools.
- [Pro] Added optional ranking weights for slug, metadata, author and comment matches.
- [Pro] Added wildcard search redirects, so
help*could match multiple search phrases.
Changed
- Raised the minimum WordPress version to 6.9 for the Abilities API.
- Improved keyboard and screen reader access to settings and repeater controls.
- [Pro] Expanded include and exclude settings to all public taxonomies.
- [Pro] Improved custom-table search performance on large sites.
- [Pro] Moved the REST API search setting to the Features tab.
Security
- Hardened thumbnail dimensions to prevent markup injection through custom image sizes.
Fixed
- Cached search results could appear in the wrong language on WPML, Polylang and TranslatePress sites.
- Searches covering taxonomies, metadata, authors or comments could time out on large sites.
- Common words were not excluded on sites without a Better Search translation.
- Network search caches remained stale after settings changes or manual cache clearing, and nested queries could prevent caching.
- Cache-clearing confirmation and error messages were missing.
- Live search suggestions could reopen after pressing Escape or submitting the search.
- [Pro] Custom-table searches ignored some search settings, taxonomy weights and term restrictions.
- [Pro] Custom-table searches could show empty pages, and multisite searches could repeat, skip or return posts from the wrong site.
- [Pro] Multisite custom-table searches returned no results when
posts_per_pagewas-1. - [Pro] Custom-table schema and taxonomy indexes were not reliably updated.
- [Pro] Fuzzy searches could ignore Boolean operators or match common words, returning too many results.
- [Pro] Multisite and fuzzy searches could omit posts matching slugs, taxonomies, metadata, authors or comments.
- [Pro] Search terms containing a dollar sign followed by a digit were omitted from relevance scoring.
Earlier versions
For the changelog of earlier versions, please refer to the releases page on GitHub.