Description
Highlights search term (customizable colours), collects search analytics (privacy friendly), extends default search engine or disable search completely. WP Search Tools, brand new 2024 WordPress plugin, is a collection of useful improvements to the site search functionality if used or not.
Search Analytics
Do you know what people search for on your website, actually?
WordPress core doesn’t store any statistical data, but the WP Search Tools plugin shows detailed insights about the history of searched terms. The Insights is a great analytics tool which tells you what users really look for. No personal data is saved.
There are 3 overviews:
1) All Users
2) Logged in
3) Guests (not logged in users)
Each overview data is represented by a graph and popularity lists.
The graph data can customized and exported either as an image (.svg or .png) or as a .csv file. Most frequent search terms are sorted by a date: ‘today’, ‘last 7 days’, ‘last 30 days’, ‘this year’, ‘overall’.
Highlight Search Term
In the search results page, the search term is highlighted with a smooth, eye-catching CSS animation. The highlight feature is activated by default.
User experience is enhanced and visual mark speeds up finding relevant information. Furthermore, highlight settings are customizable, both background colour and text colour can be set in the WordPress administration options page.
Extend Search
Free version of the plugin extends the default search engine. It allows searching in custom post types, taxonomies, authors and meta data. All these data of the website are hidden to the basic WordPress search engine and cannot be reached via search functionality.
The results are ordered by relevance not post date. The settings can be customized to fit exact needs. It is possible to choose which post types, meta data or taxonomies should be included in the search.
Disable Search
The plugin prevents WordPress from allowing and handling any search requests from the front-end of the site. If search is not used on the website, it is useful to disable it completely. The seach form is hidden, if called with a standard get_search_form() function, the search requests redirect to a 404 error page. The setting is customizable, you can turn it on/off.
Key Features
- collects search terms what people look for
- displays graph with recent data
- highlights search term
- sorts data according to the users (logged in, guests) and dates
- highlights the term if it has no results
- shows basic overview on the Dashboard
- extends default search engine with post types, meta data, taxonomies, meta data
- orders search results by relevance
- settings are customizable
- disable search
Links
Screenshots
Highlight Search Term 
Search Insights 
The Graph of the Searches 
Settings 
How to Zoom the Graph 
Admin Menu Item
Installation
Automated Installation
Type ‘highlight search term’ (best position in the results) into the plugin search and scroll to find the Search Tools plugin. When installed and activated, search analytics and highlight search term functionalities are immediately working for you.
Manual Alternatives
Alternatively, upload (e.g. via FileZilla ftp client) the Search Tools plugin files manually to your server into the ‘wp-content/plugins’ folder.
Or download the plugin in a .ZIP format and upload via the WordPress plugin management administration page: ‘Plugins – Add New Plugin – Upload Plugin (button at the top)’. If you need additional help feel free to contact the support.
FAQ
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There are many WordPress search plugins. Why should I choose the Search Tools?
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You are right. There are many tiny plugins, each solving some limitation of the default WordPress search. But we group together these features into the one plugin and extend them with extra settings and possibilities.
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How do I find a plugin in search when I want to install it?
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Type ‘highlight search term’ (best position in the results) into the plugin search and scroll to find the Search Tools plugin.
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Do I need to set anything after installation and activation?
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Search ‘analytics’ and ‘highlight’ feature are enabled by default. If you want to extend the WordPress search engine, go to ‘Search Tools – Extend Search’. If you wish to disable the search feature, check the setting in the ‘Search Tools’ options page.
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Is there a PRO version of the plugin?
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It is! Premium version offers features like ‘Beautify Search URL’, ‘Search Term Validator’, ‘Promotions’ and others. Check the PRO features website for more detailed information and pricing.
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There is not many ‘active installations’ yet. Why?
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Search Tools is a new plugin, uploaded to the wordpress.org plugin repository in April, 2024. It passed all the security and best practises tests. The use is secure and the plugin is lightweight. Feel free to try it and the feedback is very appreciated!
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“Search Tools – Advanced Search Analytics, Highlight, Extend, Disable” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Search Tools – Advanced Search Analytics, Highlight, Extend, Disable” has been translated into 2 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.