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WPBeginner» Blog» Tutorials» How to Highlight the Search Terms in Results in WordPress

How to Highlight the Search Terms in Results in WordPress

Last updated on May 8th, 2015 by Editorial Staff
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How to Highlight the Search Terms in Results in WordPress

In an attempt to make your WordPress search even more user friendly, you can highlight the search terms in the results. We did this for one of our clients, so we thought it would be useful for other users. In this article we will show you how you can highlight search terms in the results in WordPress.

Highlighting search terms in WordPress search results

First open your search.php and look for the following code:

<?php the_title(); ?>

Replace the above code with:

<?php echo $title; ?>

Make sure that you paste this line above the title code:

<?php $title = get_the_title(); $keys= explode(" ",$s); $title = preg_replace('/('.implode('|', $keys) .')/iu', '<strong class="search-excerpt">\0</strong>', $title); ?>

Now open your CSS file and add the styling for the class search-excerpt, and it will highlight the term. Currently the code is making the search terms bold. You can try this simple CSS in your theme’s stylesheet.

strong.search-excerpt { 
background-color:yellow;
color:blue;
}

Source: Michael Martin

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16 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Rachelle says:
    Feb 27, 2018 at 12:35 pm

    This works great but how do you highlight the search term in the excerpt and not just the title?

    Reply
  2. Imme says:
    Jul 26, 2017 at 7:43 am

    Hej, thank you very much for this very helpful piece of code. Is there a way to exclude links? The code as is breaks many of the “more”-links on my site.

    Reply
  3. Vernon Fowler says:
    Apr 30, 2017 at 7:32 am

    Any chance you can update this neat tutorial for modern themes such as Twenty Seventeen where instead of title() in the loop, the loop goes through:

     get_template_part( 'template-parts/post/content', 'excerpt' );

    I’m comfortable with replacing

    <strong class="search-excerpt">\0</strong>

    with HTML5

    <mark>\0</mark>

    and the relevant CSS.

    Or will we need a different approach in themes using get_template_part ?

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Apr 30, 2017 at 3:13 pm

      Hey Vernon,

      Thanks for the suggestion. We will try to update the article with more detailed instructions.

      Meanwhile, you will need to edit the /template-parts/content-search.php template. If your theme does not have it, then you can create it and then reference it in your search.php template.

      Reply
      • Vernon Fowler says:
        Apr 30, 2017 at 7:03 pm

        That’s working. Thank you.

        Can we do the same for the_content as for the the_title or do we need a different approach?

        Reply
  4. Wayan Cenik says:
    Feb 10, 2017 at 11:54 pm

    Thanks a lot for the code, is work perfectly
    I just the code at function, and done, is work

    Reply
  5. Marlene says:
    Nov 22, 2015 at 8:53 am

    Hi

    I can´t find on my site. I have this:

    How can I change someting in that?

    Thanks
    Marlene

    Reply
  6. Steph says:
    Jun 11, 2015 at 2:10 am

    There is no “” in my search.php file..
    —————————–
    Mine looks like this:

    “”

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Jun 11, 2015 at 11:32 am

      Seems like you wanted to paste code and it stripped out. Please wrap your code around [php] [/php] tags

      Reply
  7. Mahesh says:
    Apr 8, 2014 at 7:18 am

    Thanks @michael

    Reply
  8. Steve says:
    May 22, 2013 at 9:35 am

    This doesn’t even come close to working. All it does is display the title of the page the search term is found on. The terms themselves aren’t wrapped in any tags whatsoever.

    Reply
    • nate says:
      May 28, 2015 at 1:32 pm

      Actually, it works perfectly. I don’t think you know what you are doing.

      Reply
  9. Jason says:
    Nov 20, 2012 at 2:01 am

    Thanks! Works like a charm!

    Reply
  10. Chris says:
    Dec 27, 2010 at 8:26 am

    You should add a little example image on every tutorial, that would be more understandable (:

    Reply
  11. DauAnunturi says:
    Nov 26, 2010 at 8:20 am

    Nice tutorial. And for those wo want to make some highlight with colors they must define their css class as div.highlight
    and replace the code with
    And that`s alll. Thanks and have fun.

    Reply
  12. Nina says:
    Feb 16, 2010 at 8:21 pm

    Very helpful tutorial, will use it later on :)
    Thanks for sharing!

    Reply

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