How to Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress
How to Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress
Want to show blog post comments in WordPress search results? By default, WordPress search does not include comments. This can make it difficult for your visitors to find interesting conversations and interact with other users. In this article, we will show you how to add searchable blog comments to your WordPress website.
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A comment section that is dynamic and interesting will keep people on your WordPress website for a longer period of time and give a social feel to the website space.
Because of this, comments are valuable content and you should do everything you can to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.
However, since WordPress does not include comments in its search results by default, visitors may struggle to find interesting discussions and connect with other users or revisit a specific topic on your WordPress blog.
You may even use the comments section for your visitors to post comments or testimonials. Having searchable reviews can help increase sales on your online store, as people are more likely to find exactly the product they are looking for.
That being said, let’s see how you can fix these problems with searchable blog post comments in WordPress.
Searchable comments on the website
The easiest way to search for blog post comments in WordPress is to use the SearchWP plugin.
SearchWP is the best custom search plugin for WordPress, used by over 30,000 websites. It’s easy to use and allows you to improve WordPress’ built-in search.
You can also easily configure this plugin to include custom post types in WordPress search results as well as registered users.
To make your blog post comments searchable, you need to install and activate SearchWP.
After activation, you will see a window telling you that SearchWP has already created an engine for you to use. The first step is to customize this engine.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to change the default engine, so you can go ahead and click the “close” button to exit the popup.
You will now be automatically redirected to the SearchWP » Settings page.
On this page, click the “License” tab. Now you can enter your key in the “License” box:
You will find this information in the email you received when you purchased SearchWP and in your account on the SearchWP site.
After pasting the license key, click the “Activate” button next to it.
Next, just click on the “Engines” tab to customize everything the plugin displays in search results.
Here you will see that by default, posts are searchable and divided into Title, Content, Slog and Excerpt.
To make comments searchable on your site, you’ll want to click the “Sources & Settings” button near the top right of the page:
A pop-up window will appear in the middle of your screen.
Under the heading “Sources”, you will see the different types of content that SearchWP is able to search.
By default, this plugin searches your site’s posts, pages, and media:
Go ahead and check the “comments” box. Then you can click on “Done”.
This includes all comments in search results on your site.
You can further customize how your blog comments are searched by scrolling down to the “Engines” tab. You will see a new section where you can configure how to search for your comments.
Click the Add/Remove Attributes button to begin.
On this page, you’ll see sections for the different parts of comments that SearchWP includes in its search results, such as the author’s name, email, and the comment text itself.
SearchWP can search the comment author’s name and email address, as well as the content of the comment itself.
In the image below, we tell SearchWP to monitor the content by checking the “Comment” box as well as the name and email address of the person who posted it.
After making your selection, click on the “Done” button:
Any options you checked will now appear in the “Comments” section of the “Engines” tab.
For each, SearchWP has an “Applicable Attribute Relevance” scale.
Content that matches a highly relevant attribute will appear higher in search results. Conversely, content that matches an attribute that is less relevant will appear lower in the user’s search results.
By default, all feature sliders are set to “low”, but you can change this by dragging the slider to the right.
Every site is unique, so you may want to try different related settings to see what gives you the most accurate and useful search results.
If you later decide you want to remove a feature from your search, you can simply repeat the steps above, but uncheck the box next to it.
Once you are happy with how the search feature is set up, you can go ahead and click the “Save Engines” button.
After a few moments, SearchWP will show the message “The index needs to be rebuilt”.
If you get this message, go ahead and click the “Rebuild Index” button. This will add all comments on your site to the search index so that they appear in relevant results.
Once you do this, SearchWP will look at your WordPress site’s comments when generating search results.
How to change SearchWP settings
Now that your blog post comments are searchable, you may want to enable some advanced settings that make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
To take a look at these advanced search settings, click the “Advanced” tab.
On this page, you can change many of the plugin’s functions, such as making settings for spelling mistakes.
For example, if someone misspells their search term, SearchWP can add a “Did you mean?” correction box. with results similar to what the search term should have shown.
The image below shows an example of how it might look on your website:
To use this feature in your searches, go ahead and check the Automatic “Did you mean?” option. Check ‘corrections’.
You should also check the “Partial matches (fuzzy when necessary)” box, because the “Did you mean?” It uses partial matching:
We hope this article helps you learn how to add searchable blog comments to your WordPress. Good luck!
