Of course. There are numerous approaches to doing a Search/Replace on your website’s post data.
When it comes to doing a “Search and Replace”, there are various methods you could use within WordPress depending on what exactly you want to accomplish.
Best Search and Replace Plugins for WordPress
Let’s take a look at some of the best options for doing a Search and Replace or Find and Replace on the post data of a WordPress website:
- Use the WP-CLI search-replace command searches/replaces strings in the database – developer resources documentation for this function available on WordPress.org [developer’s recommendation]
- Better Find and Replace plugin by CodeSolz
- Better Search Replace plugin by WP Engine
- Real-Time Find and Replace plugin by Marios Alexandrou
- Search Regex plugin by John Godley [developer’s recommendation]
- Search-Replace-DB tool available on Github
The easiest and most efficient way to do a search and replace throughout your website is by using a plugin like these listed above. These plugins allows you to easily search through all of your site’s content (including posts, pages, comments, etc.) and find any instances of text that match what you are looking for.
You can then quickly replace them with whatever new text or HTML code you want without having to manually make the changes yourself in each individual post/page.
Depending on what data you’re looking to replace and how many times it appears on your site, this can be a great way to speed up the process.
Why use a plugin to do a Search and Replace?
There are many reasons you might use tools like this.
- Plugin-based methods are generally easier to use than the other two, as they provide a nice user interface which makes it much simpler for users with little technical knowledge.
- Plugins make it easy to find and fix broken links on your WordPress website.
- Plugins also have options to exclude certain tables or specific areas of your site, so you can be sure that not everything gets replaced. This is important if you want to avoid any potential issues from incorrectly replacing content.
- You don’t need any extra tools such as phpMyAdmin (as needed for the PHP method) and are able to stay completely within WordPress admin panel itself – making it a great option for those who aren’t confident using FTP or working in PHP.
During any WordPress migration, there are often URLs requiring changes, even when using a good migration plugin. During rebrands, organizations may want to redact mentions of the old brand and replace them with the new organization name. No matter why you’re exploring this, we hope these options can help you to search and replace whatever string needs to be modified.
