How to Create Custom Fields Searchable in WordPress

hey, friends today I will tell you How to Create Custom Fields Searchable in WordPress. so let get started with our today WordPress guide. Getting different problems is altogether gives a very different experience. today the WordPress guide I am going to share with you is How to Create Custom Fields Searchable in WordPress.

How to Create Custom Fields Searchable in WordPress

If you want that your visitors can easily search custom fields to find content on your website? then you are right place because here in this article I will answer your question that you are searching for on the internet.

WordPress search doesn’t work with custom fields by default, which can make it harder for your visitors to find what they need. By making custom fields searchable, you can provide a better user experience for your visitors.

Before starting I know you might also like me other WordPress related guides

Do You Actually know What is Custom Fields & Why You want to Make Them Searchable?

WordPress custom fields enable you to store any type of extra information (metadata) about a post or page.

WordPress adds metadata to your posts and pages such as title, author, date, time, and more. Custom fields allow you to add more information about your content and display it on your website if desired. Custom fields are used to store important data in many popular WordPress plugins and themes.

For example, the content you enter in WordPress SEO plugins like All in One SEO is technically a custom field, and custom product attributes that you add to your WooCommerce products are sometimes custom fields as well.

AIOSEO Product Title Optimization

However, WordPress does not use custom fields to search for content on your website. When a visitor uses your website’s search bar, WordPress will only show them results where the title and content match their search terms.

Making your custom fields searchable on your WordPress website improves the user experience. It enables your visitors to easily search for any content, keeping them on your website longer and reducing frustration.

Learn How to Make Custom Field Searchable in WordPresss

The SearchWP plugin is the simplest way to make custom fields searchable. It’s the best WordPress search plugin because it lets you change the search algorithm without changing the code.

Everything on your WordPress site is indexed by the plugin. For example, it makes use of custom fields, PDF documents, text, custom tables, files, categories, shortcodes, and other features to improve WordPress search for your users.

Furthermore, SearchWP integrates seamlessly with other popular plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields, Meta Box, Toolset, Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, and Pods.

SearchWP

To start indexing your custom fields, first, you’ll need to install and activate the SearchWP plugin.

  • Upon activation, you can head over to Settings » SearchWP and then navigate to the ‘Engines’ tab from the WordPress admin panel.
  • After that, you’ll need to click the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button to add custom fields to the search algorithm for your posts, pages, and media.
Add and remove attributes
  • When you click the button, a popup window will now appear.
  • Go ahead and click the dropdown menu under Custom
  • Fields and then select the ‘Any Meta Key’ option to make all your custom fields searchable.
  • you can type the custom fields you want to include during the search process. if you don’t want to include them all.
Choose any meta key
  • Once you’ve chosen the custom fields, simply click the ‘Done’ button.
  • A custom fields option will now be added to the search algorithm for posts. You can see the ‘Custom Fields’ under the Applicable Attribute Relevance section.
  • Next, you can adjust the attribute slider to set the relevance weight given to each attribute during a search.
Adjust the search relevance

For example, if you move the slider to the right and set it to maximum, then SearchWP will give high preference to the data in the custom fields when searching content on your site.

You can now repeat the step for making custom fields searchable for pages and media files.

After making these changes, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Engines’ button.

Click the Save Engines button

SearchWP will now index your content, PDF metadata, custom fields metadata, images, files, and other types of metadata to include in WordPress search.

You’ll be able to see the ‘Index Status’ in the right corner and view how many items the plugin has indexed.

SearchWP index status

Besides that, SearchWP also offers other customization settings.

For instance, if you go to the ‘Settings’ tab, then you can add stopwords and synonyms to be ignored during the search process to improve relevancy and performance.

The plugin will already have a list by default, but you can add more stopwords if you want. Similarly, you can add synonyms for search terms that you want to ignore while searching.

Add stopwords in settings

Next, you can edit more settings by going to the ‘Advanced’ tab.

For example, the plugin lets you enable the option to show partial matches when search terms show no result, limit results to exact matches when double quotes are used, remove minimum word length, and more.

SearchWP Advanced Settings

Now, if you want to see the search history and see which queries your users search the most, then head over to the ‘Statistics’ tab.

The plugin will give all the stats about your WordPress search from the past 30 days or the last 1 year. You can use this data to see which queries your users search while on your site and come up with new content ideas.

View search stats

We hope this article helped you learn how to make custom fields searchable in WordPress.

If you have any queries, then do not hesitate to ask me in the comment section. Your suggestions are also welcomed. Have a good day!

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