Extend search functionality to search in selected post meta, taxonomies, post types, and all authors.
As of April 2026, WP Extended Search is a WordPress search plugin with 20K+ active installations and a 4.9/5 rating from 72 reviews. It has been downloaded 348K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 4.9+ and PHP 7.0+. Available on WordPress.org since 2014. Download volume is stable this week. Support resolution rate: 0%. Top alternative: Ivory Search – WordPress Search Plugin.
WP Extended Search is a lightweight and powerful search plugin.
With this plugin you can customize WordPress search to search in Post Meta, Author names, Categories, Tags, or Custom Taxonomies via admin settings. You can control the default behavior of WordPress to search in the post title, post content, and post excerpt.
Apart from customizing default search behavior, you can create multiple search settings, and then you can assign these settings to custom search forms.
For custom search forms, you have the option to choose from a widget, shortcode, PHP function, or HTML.
WordPress default search is absolutely terrible. This plugin dramatically improves the search capabilities of WordPress.
Works brilliantly! Simple to set up and supports custom post types and custom fields created with Pods.
Fantastic plugin, got me out of a serious issue I was having with search functionality. Works flawlessly, highly recommend. Thank you…
Thnx!
Thanks works super good, keep up the great work
| WordPress | 4.9+ requiredTested up to 6.9.4 |
| PHP | 7.0+ required |
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.