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Why WordPress Search Can't Find Text Inside Bold or Colored Formatting

22 threads Sep 16, 2025 Core → Requests and feedback

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Have you ever used the WordPress search bar to find a specific phrase on your site, only to get zero results—even though you know the text is there? A common and frustrating culprit for this is text formatted with bold, italics, or color.

The Problem: HTML Code Breaks Search Indexing

When you apply formatting in the WordPress editor, it wraps your text in HTML tags. For example, the word "important" becomes <strong>important</strong>.

The native WordPress search function often indexes and searches the raw text content, but it can get confused by these HTML tags. If a user searches for a phrase that is split across two different HTML tags, the search may fail to recognize it as a continuous string. For instance, searching for "3456" in the formatted text "123456" might not work because the search engine sees "123" and "456" as separate entities due to the intervening <strong> tag.

How to Troubleshoot and Fix WordPress Search Issues

1. Test with a Default Theme and No Plugins

The first step is to rule out conflicts with your theme or other plugins. Temporarily switch to a default WordPress theme like Twenty Twenty-Four and deactivate all your plugins. If the search works correctly afterward, reactivate your plugins one by one to identify the one causing the conflict. Your theme's search.php template file could also be modifying the default search behavior.

2. Consider a Dedicated Search Plugin

Many popular search replacement plugins are designed to handle these types of indexing issues more effectively than the default WordPress search. Plugins like Relevanssi or SearchWP often index content while stripping HTML tags, allowing them to find text regardless of its formatting. This is often the most robust long-term solution.

3. Modify the Search Query with Code (For Developers)

For those comfortable with code, you can use the posts_search filter to modify the search query and potentially ignore HTML tags. However, this approach requires careful testing to avoid introducing performance issues or other bugs. The following snippet is a basic example and should be tested on a staging site first.

function improve_search_query( $search, $wp_query ) {
    global $wpdb;
    if ( ! is_admin() && $wp_query->is_search() ) {
        // This is a very simplistic approach and may need refinement
        $search_term = get_query_var( 's' );
        $search = " AND ({$wpdb->posts}.post_content LIKE '%" . esc_sql( $wpdb->esc_like( $search_term ) ) . "%')";
    }
    return $search;
}
add_filter( 'posts_search', 'improve_search_query', 10, 2 );

If you are experiencing this issue, the conflict test is the best place to start. For many users, investing in a dedicated search plugin provides the most reliable fix.

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