Better Search – Relevant search results for WordPress

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.

Here are some of the main features of 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:

• 🔍 Multisite Search
• ✨ Fuzzy Matches
• 🎯 Relevance Threshold
• 🔗 Search Post Slugs
• ⚙️ REST API Integration

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.

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
• 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

WordPress install

1. Navigate to Plugins within your WordPress Admin Area.

2. Click “Add new” and enter “Better Search” in the search box.

3. Find the plugin in the list (usually the first result) and click “Install Now”.

Manual install

1. Download the plugin

2. Extract the contents of better-search.zip to wp-content/plugins/ folder. You should get a folder called better-search.

3. Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.

4. Goto Settings > Better Search to configure

1. 

   Better Search Dashboard

2. 

   Better Search Popular Searches table in Admin

3. 

   Better Search widget

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.

4.2.1

• Modifications:

  • Updated Freemius SDK.
  • Handle post_type when passed through as a query variable.
  • Added REST API support for custom post type search queries.

• Bug fixes:

  • HTML entities are now decoded in the Live Search results.
  • Phrases with double quotes are correctly handled.

4.2.0

Release post: https://webberzone.com/announcements/better-search-v4-2-0/

• Features:

  • [Pro] New: Efficient Content Storage and Indexing – Custom tables implementation for better performance and query optimization while maintaining the same relevance algorithm.
  • [Pro] New: MAX_EXECUTION_TIME hint for MySQL queries.
  • [Pro] New: LIKE fallback search.
  • New: Wizard to guide users through the setup process.
  • Copy to clipboard functionality for SQL queries in the Tools page.

• Modifications:

  • Improved caching in Core Query to catch score and blog ID.
  • New function: bsearch_get_blog_option() to get a Better Search option for a specific blog.
  • New network settings/tools page.
  • [Pro] A new button to fix any collation issues has been added to the Network Admin Settings page.
  • Updated Freemius SDK.
  • Live search displays a loading state while results are being fetched.
  • Fulltext indexes are now named wz_title_content, wz_title, and wz_content to ensure compatibility and optimize database space, especially when using Contextual Related Posts. After updating to this version, please recreate the indexes to benefit from the changes—until then, the plugin will use the previous index names.

• Bug fix:

  • Fixed an issue where the Live Search conflicted with Mega Menu Pro.
  • Fixed an issue where activating the Pro plugin while the Free plugin was active, or vice versa, would cause a fatal error.

For previous changelog entries, please refer to the separate changelog.txt file or Github Releases page