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Fine-tune relevance, search across different fields and post types, track popular queries, and customise the output \u2014 all without writing a single line of code.<\/p>\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Awesome features in Better Search:<\/h3>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Automatic<\/strong>: Just activate the plugin and enjoy better search results right away<\/li>\n<li><strong>Seamless integration<\/strong>: No need to edit any code or create custom search templates<\/li>\n<li><strong>Relevance<\/strong>: Sort the results by relevance or date, and assign different weights to title and content<\/li>\n<li><strong>Control the results<\/strong>: Search within title, content, excerpt, meta fields, authors, tags and other taxonomies and comments<\/li>\n<li><strong>Popular searches<\/strong>: Show a heatmap of the most popular searches on your site, either as a widget or a shortcode<\/li>\n<li><strong>AJAX Live Search<\/strong>: Show search results as you type in any search form on your site<\/li>\n<li><strong>Customisation<\/strong>: Use your own template file and CSS styles for the ultimate look and feel<\/li>\n<li><strong>Supports cache plugins<\/strong>: Works seamlessly with caching plugins like WP-Super-Cache and W3 Total Cache<\/li>\n<li><strong>Profanity filter<\/strong>: Filter out any words that you don't want to appear in search queries<\/li>\n<li><strong>Translation ready<\/strong>: Use the plugin in any language<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>If you want to improve your site search, download Better Search today and experience the difference for yourself.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Features in Better Search Pro<\/h3>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/plugins\/better-search\/pro\/\"><strong>Better Search Pro<\/strong><\/a> gives you even more control and performance:<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>\ud83d\uddc4\ufe0f <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/efficient-content-storage-and-indexing\/\">Efficient Content Storage and Indexing<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\ud83d\udd0d <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/multisite-search\/\">Multisite Search<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u2728 <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/fuzzy-matches\/\">Fuzzy Matches<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\ud83c\udfaf <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/better-search-settings-search\/#minimum-relevance-percentage-pro-only\">Relevance Threshold<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\ud83d\udd17 <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/better-search-settings-search\/#search-post-slug-pro-only\">Search Post Slugs<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u2699\ufe0f <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/better-search-rest-api\/\">REST API Integration<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\ud83d\udd04 <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/better-search-settings-search\/#enable-like-fallback-pro-only\">LIKE Fallback Search<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u2696\ufe0f <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/better-search-settings-search\/#post-excerpt-pro-only\">Advanced Relevance Weighting<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h3>MySQL FULLTEXT indices<\/h3>\n\n<p>Better Search adds the following MySQL FULLTEXT indices to the <code>wp_posts<\/code> table:<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><code>post_content<\/code><\/li>\n<li><code>post_title<\/code><\/li>\n<li><code>(post_title, post_content)<\/code><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>On multisite, these are added to each blog upon activation. These indices power the relevance-based search and are required for full functionality.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Contribute<\/h3>\n\n<p>Better Search is also available on <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/WebberZone\/better-search\">Github<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Plugins by WebberZone<\/h3>\n\n<p>Better Search is one of the many plugins developed by WebberZone. Check out our other plugins:<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/contextual-related-posts\/\">Contextual Related Posts<\/a> - Display related posts on your WordPress blog and feed<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/webberzone-link-warnings\/\">WebberZone Link Warnings<\/a> - Add accessible warnings for external links and target=\"_blank\" links<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/top-10\/\">Top 10<\/a> - Track daily and total visits to your blog posts and display the popular and trending posts<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/knowledgebase\/\">Knowledge Base<\/a> - Create a knowledge base or FAQ section on your WordPress site<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/add-to-all\/\">WebberZone Snippetz<\/a> - The ultimate snippet manager for WordPress to create and manage custom HTML, CSS or JS code snippets<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/plugins\/autoclose\/\">Auto-Close<\/a> - Automatically close comments, pingbacks and trackbacks and manage revisions on your WordPress site<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h4>Multilingual sites<\/h4>\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n<!--section=installation-->\n<h4>WordPress install<\/h4>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>Navigate to Plugins within your WordPress Admin Area.<\/p><\/li>\n<li><p>Click \"Add new\" and enter \"Better Search\" in the search box.<\/p><\/li>\n<li><p>Find the plugin in the list (usually the first result) and click \"Install Now\".<\/p><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n<h4>Manual install<\/h4>\n\n<ol>\n<li><p>Download the plugin<\/p><\/li>\n<li><p>Extract the contents of better-search.zip to wp-content\/plugins\/ folder. You should get a folder called better-search.<\/p><\/li>\n<li><p>Activate the Plugin in WP-Admin.<\/p><\/li>\n<li><p>Goto <strong>Settings &gt; Better Search<\/strong> to configure<\/p><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n<!--section=faq-->\n<p>If your question has not been covered here, please create a new post in the <a href=\"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/support\/plugin\/better-search\">WordPress.org support forum<\/a>. I monitor the forums regularly. If you want more advanced <em>paid<\/em> support, please see <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/\">details here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<dl>\n<dt id=\"will%20this%20work%20with%20any%20wordpress%20theme%3F\"><h3>Will this work with any WordPress theme?<\/h3><\/dt>\n<dd><p>Yes! It replaces the default WordPress search and integrates with most themes out of the box.<\/p><\/dd>\n<dt id=\"does%20it%20support%20woocommerce%20or%20custom%20post%20types%3F\"><h3>Does it support WooCommerce or custom post types?<\/h3><\/dt>\n<dd><p>Yes, you can enable searching in any public post type from the settings.<\/p><\/dd>\n<dt id=\"how%20does%20it%20affect%20performance%3F\"><h3>How does it affect performance?<\/h3><\/dt>\n<dd><p>Better Search uses MySQL FULLTEXT indexes and includes internal caching. It also works well with external caching plugins.<\/p><\/dd>\n<dt id=\"can%20i%20customise%20the%20search%20results%20template%3F\"><h3>Can I customise the search results template?<\/h3><\/dt>\n<dd><p>Yes, you can override the results template by copying the file to your theme directory. More info in the <a href=\"https:\/\/webberzone.com\/support\/knowledgebase\/better-search-templates\/\">documentation<\/a>.<\/p><\/dd>\n<dt id=\"what%20is%20the%20profanity%20filter%3F\"><h3>What is the Profanity Filter?<\/h3><\/dt>\n<dd><p>It filters out selected keywords from being searched. Handy for family-safe sites.<\/p>\n\n<p>Better Search includes a very cool profanity filter using the script from <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/snipe\/banbuilder\">Banbuilder<\/a>. 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.<\/p><\/dd>\n<dt id=\"how%20can%20i%20report%20security%20bugs%3F\"><h3>How can I report security bugs?<\/h3><\/dt>\n<dd><p>You can report security bugs through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team help validate, triage and handle any security vulnerabilities. <a href=\"https:\/\/patchstack.com\/database\/vdp\/better-search\">Report a security vulnerability.<\/a><\/p><\/dd>\n\n<\/dl>\n\n<!--section=changelog-->\n<h4>4.5.2<\/h4>\n\n<p>Release date: 15 October 2026<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Security<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Prevented thumbnail fallbacks from using images inside or attached to password-protected posts before the password was entered.<\/li>\n<li>Hardened thumbnail URLs to reject unsafe protocols.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p><strong>Fixed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Malformed custom thumbnail dimensions caused PHP errors during image-size selection.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h4>4.5.1<\/h4>\n\n<p>Release date: 12 October 2026<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Added<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>[Pro] Ask AI in theme search forms, plus model settings for AI answers with a Compare models window.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p><strong>Changed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Cached searches with no matches, refreshing them when posts changed.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Renamed ECSI to Efficient Content Storage and Indexing.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Reused cached AI answers for reworded questions until their source posts change.<\/li>\n<li>Updated Freemius SDK to the latest version.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p><strong>Fixed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Searches raised a PHP 8.5 deprecation warning while loading stopwords.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h4>4.5.0<\/h4>\n\n<p>Release date: 2 October 2026\nRelease post: https:\/\/webberzone.com\/announcements\/better-search-v4-5\/<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Added<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Added WordPress Abilities API support for site searches, with an option to disable it in the Features tab.<\/li>\n<li>Added a Status section to Tools showing database, index and cache health.<\/li>\n<li>Added a setting to restrict search results to selected terms.<\/li>\n<li>Added <code>*<\/code> wildcard support to filtered words, so <code>spam*<\/code> also blocked \"spammer\".<\/li>\n<li>Added translated titles and language-specific links to TranslatePress live-search suggestions.<\/li>\n<li>Added the <code>data-bsearch-live-search=\"off\"<\/code> form attribute, so forms with their own live search did not show a second list of suggestions.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Added abilities for popular search terms, spelling suggestions and cache clearing.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Added optional AI answers grounded in Better Search results, with source links, cached answers, usage limits and a Content gaps report.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Added WP-CLI commands for AI questions, answer-cache management and Content gaps.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Expanded Tools status with custom-table and AI-provider health.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Added optional recency weighting, disabled by default; existing custom-table indexes required a one-time backfill from Tools.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Added optional ranking weights for slug, metadata, author and comment matches.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Added wildcard search redirects, so <code>help*<\/code> could match multiple search phrases.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p><strong>Changed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Raised the minimum WordPress version to 6.9 for the Abilities API.<\/li>\n<li>Improved keyboard and screen reader access to settings and repeater controls.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Expanded include and exclude settings to all public taxonomies.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Improved custom-table search performance on large sites.<\/li>\n<li>[Pro] Moved the REST API search setting to the Features tab.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p><strong>Security<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Hardened thumbnail dimensions to prevent markup injection through custom image sizes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p><strong>Fixed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Cached search results could appear in the wrong language on WPML, Polylang and TranslatePress sites.<\/li>\n<li>Searches covering taxonomies, metadata, authors or comments could time out on large sites.<\/li>\n<li>Common words were not excluded on sites without a Better Search translation.<\/li>\n<li>Network search caches remained stale after settings changes or manual cache clearing, and nested queries could prevent caching.<\/li>\n<li>Cache-clearing confirmation and error messages were missing.<\/li>\n<li>Live search suggestions could reopen after pressing Escape or submitting the search.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h4>Earlier versions<\/h4>\n\n<p>For the changelog of earlier versions, please refer to the <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/WebberZone\/better-search\/releases\">releases page on GitHub<\/a>.<\/p>","raw_excerpt":"Better Search replaces the default WordPress search with a better search engine that gives contextual results sorted by relevance.","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/plugin\/5018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/plugin"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/plugin"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5018"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wporg\/v1\/users\/ajay"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"plugin_section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/plugin_section?post=5018"},{"taxonomy":"plugin_tags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/plugin_tags?post=5018"},{"taxonomy":"plugin_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/plugin_category?post=5018"},{"taxonomy":"plugin_contributors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/plugin_contributors?post=5018"},{"taxonomy":"plugin_business_model","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tah.wordpress.org\/plugins\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/plugin_business_model?post=5018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}