The WordPress Magazine

As your site grows it becomes really important to help your visitors find what they want.

You’ve probably already got a search box, but have you noticed that the built-in WordPress search only looks at post content and post titles?  The Search Everything plugin extends that to find a whole variety of extra text on your site.  It can look in pages, categories, tags, comments, custom fields and more.

As long as you already have a search box on your site you don’t need to make any theme changes, so the plugin is really quick to set up.

1. Download and install the plugin

Download and install the Search Everything plugin, and activate it in Settings > Plugins.

2. Choose what you want to be searched

In Settings > Search Everything you can see a list of things that can be searched.

Ticking every box probably isn’t a good idea: if you’ve got a lot of posts and pages on your site it might slow the search down.  Try it and find out for yourself if you like, I would be interested to know if this is the case - let me know in the comments.  I don’t have a site with a huge amount of content to test it on.

If you “Search every page” I suggest you tick the “Seach approved pages only” box too.  Similarly if you “Search every comment” you probably only want it to “Search approved comments”.

3. If your site doesn’t already have a search box

Your site might not already have a search box.  If your theme uses widgets you can add a search box by going to Design > Widgets.  If you’re unfortunate to neither have a search box in your theme by default nor have widgets enabled on your theme, leave a comment below and I’ll provide instructions for adding a search box without widgets.  Leave the name of your theme in the comment.  I haven’t given details here because it won’t be exactly the same with each theme.