Very lightweight (vanilla) Javascript that wraps search terms in an HTML5 mark tag within WordPress search results.
As of April 2026, Highlight Search Terms is a WordPress mark plugin with 7.0K+ active installations and a 5/5 rating from 40 reviews. It has been downloaded 177K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 3.7+ and PHP 5.6+. Available on WordPress.org since 2009. Actively maintained — updated within the last month. Download volume is stable this week. Support resolution rate: 100%. Top alternative: Advanced Product Labels for WooCommerce.
Highlights search terms within WordPress generated search results, both on the search results page and on each linked post page itself.
This plugin is light weight and has no options. It started as very simple fusion between How to Highlight Search Terms with jQuery – theme hack by Thaya Kareeson and Search Hilite by Ryan Boren. It has since evolved with many optimizations, HTML5 and bbPress support.
Since version 1.6 it no longer depends on the jQuery library.
Features
Nice plugin – highly reccomend.
I added the “Prevent highlighting when clicking through to result” option, all works well!
Thanks you
Nice! A plugin that works “out of the box.”
Note: If after installing this plugin you experience any issues, most likely, they are due to a conflict with another plugin (usually a Cache or Performance plugin). The developers of these other plugins should be able to help solve your issues.
Cheers 🙂
Very good. It didn’t work right away. But overall very helpful. Although I immediately found a small mistake. For some reason, “by” does not work, but “by” = “by” – I checked!
1.cbm.ua/?p=5504
Thanks for this great simple plugin.
| WordPress | 3.7+ requiredTested up to 6.8.5 |
| PHP | 5.6+ required |
2024-04-05
* Update to WP coding standards
* WP 6.5 compatibility tested
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.