Your WordPress search bar is lying to your visitors.
They type in a keyword, the content exists on your site, but WordPress says “Nothing Found.” Why?
When I first started working with WordPress, I dealt with this exact problem for months before I finally figured out what was happening. It turned out, the information visitors were searching for was stored in custom fields.
I’d created some of those fields manually, but many others were created automatically by the plugins I’d installed (that means you could be using multiple custom fields on your site right now, without your knowledge).
And WordPress doesn’t include custom field data in its search results.
Once I understood the problem, the fix turned out to be surprisingly straightforward, and it had a massive impact on my site’s user experience.
In this guide, I’m going to walk you through an easy, code-free way to make every custom field searchable. By the end of this tutorial, your visitors will finally be able to find exactly what they’re looking for, every time.
Why I Recommend Making Custom Fields Searchable
Custom fields are extra data points that you can attach to your posts, pages, products, and other content types. Many website owners add these manually, in order to provide more structured information, such as adding a ‘Rating’ field to your movie review blog.
There’s also plenty of plugins that create custom fields automatically. For example, popular SEO plugins like All in One SEO use custom fields to store optimization data.
This data is incredibly valuable to your visitors, but there’s a big problem: the default WordPress search ignores custom fields by default. Essentially, your visitors can only search through a fraction of your actual content, so all that helpful information stored in your custom fields gets completely overlooked.
I’ve watched this cause serious problems for countless WordPress websites. For example, if you’re running an online store, a shopper may try searching for a product using its SKU number. WooCommerce stores this information in a custom field, so the shopper won’t get any matches.
The same problem happens with local directories. Even if you’ve carefully added neighborhoods or zip codes to every listing, a standard WordPress search won’t see them because they’re stored in custom fields.
Every failed search is a missed opportunity, since most visitors will assume that content simply doesn’t exist on your site, and look elsewhere.
The good news is that there’s a straightforward solution. You can replace the limited WordPress search algorithm with a modern, professional search plugin. By doing this, you’re allowing visitors to scan all the content that WordPress usually ignores, helping them find exactly what they’re looking for with just a few clicks.
Step 1: Installing and Activating SearchWP
Whenever I need to improve WordPress search, the first tool I reach for is SearchWP. I’ve tried several WordPress search plugins over the years, but SearchWP consistently gives me the most control over what gets indexed and how results are ranked.
Beyond custom fields, SearchWP can also pull results from PDF documents, taxonomy terms, WooCommerce product data, custom post types, and image metadata. It essentially turns your basic WordPress search into a fully customizable search engine.
To get started, install and activate the SearchWP plugin on your WordPress site. If this is your first time adding a plugin, we have a guide on how to install a WordPress plugin that walks you through the process.
Once the plugin is active, go to SearchWP » Settings in your WordPress dashboard and click on the ‘General’ tab.
After that, paste your license key into the ‘License Key’ field. You can find this information by logging into your account on the SearchWP website. It’s also in the confirmation email you received when you purchased SearchWP.
After entering the key, click the ‘Verify Key’ button to activate your license.
Step 2: Building Your Custom Search Algorithm
Now comes the part that makes SearchWP so powerful. Instead of relying on the standard WordPress search, you can build a custom algorithm that controls exactly what content gets searched and how important each piece of data is in the final results.
To do this, go to SearchWP » Algorithm in your dashboard.
You’ll see the page divided into sections for each content type on your site. By default, all WordPress websites will have the Posts, Pages, and Media content types. However, you may see some extra options if you’ve installed WooCommerce or created custom post types.
Here, find the content type where you want to include custom fields in your search results. I usually start with Posts, but the process works the same way for every content type.
Step 3: Adding Custom Fields to the Search
After scrolling to your chosen content type, click its accompanying ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.
A popup will appear with dropdown menus for the different types of data SearchWP can index.
Inside this popup, click to open the ‘Custom Fields’ dropdown.
You now have a choice. If you want to include every custom field in your search results, select ‘Any Meta Key.’
I use this option on content-heavy sites where I don’t want visitors to miss anything important. This option ensures that nothing gets overlooked, especially when visitors might search for any number of different details.
If you want to be more selective, you can type the name of a specific custom field into the dropdown. When the right field appears, click to select it.
This is a smarter choice if your site has dozens of custom fields, but you only want to make a few searchable. For example, on a WooCommerce site you might only include fields like SKU and material, rather than including every single custom field and cluttering the results with unnecessary noise.
Just type in the name of each custom field you want to search, and click to add it to the list.
After that, click the ‘Done’ button.
Step 4: Adjusting the Weight of Each Field
After closing the popup, you’ll see a new ‘Custom Fields’ entry within your content type section. Each custom field has its own relevance slider, which is how you’ll fine-tune your results.
To give a custom field more influence over where content appears in the search results, drag its slider to the right. Alternatively, drag it to the left to make that field less important relative to everything else.
Here’s how I think about it. If the custom field contains information that visitors are likely to search for directly, I drag that slider to the right. For example, in a WooCommerce store, I might prioritize the product SKU or price. This tells SearchWP that if a visitor types in a specific SKU, that product should appear at the very top of their search results.
For fields that contain supplementary data (like Material or Color), I typically drag the slider to the left. This ensures the data is still indexed and searchable, but it won’t outrank your post titles or more important keywords.
Finding the right balance can really improve the quality of your search results. That said, I recommend returning to this screen a few times to experiment with different settings, to see whether these changes improve the quality of your search results.
Step 5: Saving and Rebuilding the Search Index
Once you’re happy with how everything is set up, scroll to the top of the page and click the ‘Save’ button.
At this point, you may see a notification: ‘This index needs to be rebuilt.’
If you see this message, go ahead and click the ‘Rebuild Index’ button.
SearchWP will immediately begin rebuilding its search index to include your new settings. The length of time this takes depends on how much content your site has. I’ve found that SearchWP indexes smaller sites in well under a minute, while larger sites with thousands of posts typically take a few minutes.
The good news is that SearchWP manages the entire rebuild in the background, so you can continue working on other things.
Once SearchWP has successfully rebuilt the index, your WordPress search bar will immediately start returning results that include matches found in your custom fields.
You don’t need to modify your search form or change any templates, as SearchWP integrates seamlessly with the default WordPress search functionality. It’s as easy as that!
Getting Even More Out of SearchWP
Once you’ve made your custom fields searchable, there are a few additional SearchWP settings that I always enable on my own sites. In my experience, these small adjustments can help visitors find exactly what they’re looking for.
To access them, go to SearchWP » Settings. Here, scroll to the ‘General Settings’ area.
Here’s the options I recommend enabling:
- Partial matches. This is a game changer for sites where visitors might not type the exact term stored in your content. After enabling partial matching, a customer who searches for ‘leather bag’ could still find a product where the custom field says ‘genuine leather bag.’
- Closest match. When a search genuinely returns no results, SearchWP will suggest the closest available content instead of showing a blank page. It’s a much better experience than leaving your visitors with nothing. In particular, I like using this feature alongside SearchWP’s partial matches to ensure visitors always have a path forward.
- Quoted searches. This allows visitors to search for an exact phrase by wrapping their search terms in quotation marks. Power users love this feature, so it’s something I always activate on sites that target a more tech-savvy audience.
- Highlight terms. For each search result, SearchWP displays a snippet of text with the keywords highlighted. It’s a feature I always use on sites with long-form content or PDFs, as it helps visitors spot the most relevant part of the document.
Tracking What Your Visitors Search For
In my opinion, one of SearchWP’s most underrated features is its built-in search analytics. Monitoring your site’s search is like reading your visitors’ minds. It reveals exactly what they’re looking for, and helps you identify any content your site may be missing.
To see this information, go to SearchWP » Statistics.
You can view data from the past 30 days, the last year, or the complete history of your site. I review these statistics regularly, because it’s the best way to identify content gaps I wouldn’t have spotted otherwise.
If I notice that visitors keep searching for a term that returns no results, that’s a clear signal. It tells me that I either need to create new content around that specific topic, or I need to update my search settings to help visitors find existing content that matches those terms.
This insight can even help you improve your WordPress SEO. By identifying the topics and keywords your audience cares about, you can optimize your posts to get more engagement and traffic.
On more than one occasion, SearchWP’s analytics have directly inspired me to create new articles that went on to become some of my most popular content.
FAQs About Making Custom Fields Searchable in WordPress
Got more questions about making custom fields searchable on your site? I get asked about this topic frequently, so I’ve put together answers to the questions that come up most often.
Whether you’re wondering about the technical impact on your site’s speed or how to handle specific types of data, these insights should help you feel more confident as you build out your custom search engine.
What exactly are custom fields and where do they come from?
Custom fields are additional pieces of information that WordPress attaches to your posts, pages, products, or any other type of content.
These custom fields live in your database as metadata, which is kept separate from the main post title and body text. You can use them to store product specifications, event dates, pricing, locations, or any other structured data.
It’s also worth noting that many popular plugins generate custom fields automatically. For example, WooCommerce uses them to store product attributes, while SEO plugins use them to save your optimization data. Because this information is tucked away in the database, you’ll need a tool like SearchWP to help your site’s search engine ‘see’ the data and index it.
Do I need technical or coding skills to make custom fields searchable?
Not at all. Simply follow the steps in this guide to make any custom field searchable in WordPress, without having to write a single line of code.
Using SearchWP, you can simply select which custom fields to include, adjust the relevance sliders to your liking, and save your settings. I’ve walked countless site owners through this process, including many who had zero technical skills, and they all managed to improve their site’s search with SearchWP.
Will adding SearchWP slow down my website?
In my experience, no. SearchWP creates and maintains its own dedicated search index. This means it doesn’t have to run heavy, complex database queries every time a visitor types into your search bar.
While the initial index build may take a few minutes, it’s a one-time process. After that, I’ve found that searches tend to be even faster than the default WordPress search.
I’ve used SearchWP on sites with thousands of posts and extensive custom field data, and I haven’t noticed any performance issues. It’s a very efficient way to handle large amounts of data without putting a strain on your server.
If you’re concerned about overall site performance, you might also want to check out our guide to the best plugins to speed up your WordPress site.
Can I choose specific custom fields to include rather than all of them?
Absolutely. As I covered in Step 3, you can control exactly which custom fields get indexed.
While the ‘Any Meta Key’ option makes every single field searchable, you can also select individual fields one-by-one.
If your site has dozens of different custom fields, I generally recommend being selective and only including the ones your visitors are actually likely to search for. In my experience, this is the best way to keep your search results focused and relevant.
What happens if I change or delete a custom field later?
SearchWP automatically synchronizes its index with your content, so any updates are usually picked up during the next index refresh. If you remove a custom field entirely, it’ll stop appearing in your search results once the index updates.
In my experience, you don’t really have to worry about manual maintenance. SearchWP stays in sync with your database to ensure your visitors always see the most current information.
Does this work with WooCommerce product attributes?
Yes! In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons why people choose SearchWP in the first place.
Many WooCommerce product attributes are stored as custom fields or taxonomy terms, and the default WordPress search often struggles to handle them correctly. With SearchWP, your customers can find products by searching for specific sizes, colors, materials, SKU numbers, or any other custom attributes.
I’ve added SearchWP to several eCommerce stores, and it’s made a massive difference to the shopping experience. If a customer can actually find what they’re looking for, they’re much more likely to make a purchase!
Is SearchWP free or does it require a paid license?
SearchWP is a premium plugin, so you’ll need a paid license to use it.
I understand that a paid plugin isn’t ideal for every budget, but after testing countless free search plugins, I’ve found a huge difference in quality.
When your visitors can actually find what they’re looking for, they stay longer, engage with more of your content, and are far more likely to take positive action such as filling out your contact form or buying a product.
However, if you don’t have the budget for a premium search plugin, there’s a few lite tools that I also recommend:
- SearchWP Live Ajax Search: This plugin adds ‘search-as-you-type’ functionality to your site, showing visitors results in a dropdown menu before they even hit enter.
- SearchWP Modal Search Form: This allows you to create a stylish, full-screen search pop-up that makes the search bar easy for your visitors to find and use.
If you’ve been following along with this guide, your custom fields are now fully searchable. Your visitors should now be able to find what they need faster, and more easily than ever before.
In my experience, this is one of those ‘invisible’ upgrades that makes a massive difference in how professional and user-friendly your site feels.
Of course, a great search engine is just one part of building a successful WordPress site. If you’re ready to keep improving your site, our comprehensive video library covers everything from the basics of site setup, right through to advanced optimization techniques.
We designed these lessons as a clear, step by step roadmap so you can build a site that’s fast, user friendly, and perfectly tailored to your audience.
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