Search Tools – Advanced Search Analytics, Highlight, Extend, Disable
by Peter Stehlík on WordPress.org
The advanced search plugin shows analytics, what users look for, can export data, highlights search term, extends default WordPress search engine.
Highlight Search Term
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
