How to Search, Find, Replace and Bulk Edit in WordPress

Making updates to WordPress posts might be as easy as 1-2-3. With the help of this tutorial, you will be able to quickly search, find, replace and bulk edit information and data on your WordPress website. This allows you to make changes to small details on a blog or update one piece of information across multiple contents all at the same time with just one click, saving you time and ensuring that everything works properly on your site. If you run into those issues again, you’ll undoubtedly return to our tutorial for a simple fix.

Why do you need to search and replace in bulk on WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source, free website-building platform for hosting and creating websites. With a plugin architecture and a template system, it excels at building and maintaining websites, and it allows you to adapt any website to meet your blog, brand, blog, online shop, or portfolio.

However, you deal with both large and small websites as a developer. Whether building a brand-new site from scratch, adding new functionality, or redesigning an existing one, each site has its own unique set of difficulties. There is a very good chance that you may occasionally need to edit previously published information.

WordPress users should perform a search and replace when appropriate:

– Resolving grammatical issues on your blogs

– Omitting particular words or special characters

– Switching from www to non-www URLs

– Changing text, shortcodes, images, or the year.

THE SEARCH REGEX TOOL

To get the plugin:

  1. Go to PLUGINS, then click “ADD NEW”
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. Look for “SEARCH REGEX”
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. Click on “INSTALL NOW”, and then click “ACTIVATE”
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.

Steps on how to use the “SEARCH REGEX” tool:

Let’s say you want to change this URL and remove the “www”

How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. Go to your WordPress dashboard first, go to Tools, and then click on the “SEARCH REGEX”
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. Type in the URL with the “www” and make sure that it’s under post type
  1. Click on “Search”, which will then show you the number of places where this “www” URL is at
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. To remove the “www”, simply enter the URL without the “www” in the “Replace” area
  1. Click on “Refresh” , and you will see that “www” has been removed
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. To complete the task, simply click “Replace All”
  1. Once it’s finished and it says finished, you just go back to your page refresh and you’ll see that it’s removed
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.

There are many ways to do bulk editing using the “SEARCH REGEX” tool. You can do it by title slag post status etc depending on what you need to bulk change or search this is one of the tools you can use

BETTER SEARCH REPLACE PLUGIN

  1. Go to your WordPress dashboard first, go to Plugins. Click on to “Add New”
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. Look for “BETTER SEARCH REPLACE”, and click on “INSTALL NOW”
  1. Once installed, click on “ACTIVATE”
How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. To get to the plugin you go to tools and then you click on to “BETTER SEARCH REPLACE”

Steps on how to use the “BETTER SEARCH REPLACE” tool:

Let’s say I want to change one of your titles from a post (For example, change “Example 1” to “Content 1” and “Example 2” to “Content 2”

How to Search, Find, Replace, and Bulk Edit in WordPress.
  1. Go to your WordPress dashboard first, go to Tools, and then click on the “BETTER SEARCH REPLACE”
  1. Under “search replace”, you search for an example post and you replace it with content
  1. Untick “Dry Run”
  1. Click on “Case Sensitive”, and then click on “Run Search/Replace”+
  1. Go back to your WordPress dashboard, refresh your dashboard, and you’ll see that it’s now changed to content 1 and content 2

Conclusion

We hope that the advice and the information that we’ve presented will benefit you when creating your site. Keep in mind that this is a high-level overview of what’s possible with search, find, replace and bulk edit in WordPress sites. Editing your WordPress website’s content is a very easy task when you have the right tool. Depending on how tech-savvy you are and how many sites you run, you might find some of these features to be pretty handy for speeding up the process of updating the pages on your site.

Thulisa Sigwabe
Thulisa Sigwabe

Thulisa is our Content Marketer and Creator here at WPHub. She creates WordPress tutorials and reviews popular plugins and tools to help you build and monetize your website faster.

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