How to Show Tags and Categories in WordPress Search Results
Here at TaxoPress, our plugins allow you to manage Tags, Categories and all your WordPress taxonomy terms. If you use terms correctly, visitors can use Tags and Categories to find content they’re interested in. In another post, we explained how to display Categories and Tags on your site.
However, there’s a limitation in the WordPress core: Tags and Categories don’t appear in search results. This makes it hard to find content tagged with specific terms.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to understand and solve this WordPress search problem.
Table of Contents
WordPress Search Results for Tags and Categories
By default, the WordPress search only returns content on your site. It will not search for media files, comments, custom fields, authors, tags, categories, and other items on your site.
Let’s see a practical example of what does NOT show in WordPress search results.
In the image below, we have a post with categories including “CMS”, “Websites” and “WordPress.
If you search for any of the categories attached to your post, you won’t get any results. In this screenshot below, I searched for “Websites” and there’s no result, even though the category is active and attached to a post.
Solving the Problem With Plugins
One way to include Categories and Tags in search results is to use the WP Extended Search plugin. This is far from the only plugin that can do this. Other plugins that can do this include Relevanssi and Better Search.
- Install the WP Extended Search plugin.
- Go to “Extended Search” and then “Search Settings” in your WordPress admin menu.
- Choose “Categories” and “Tags” in the “Select Taxonomies” box.
- Click “Save Changes”.
Now when you search for “Websites”, the WordPress search will show any content that is linked to that category. It will not index the archive page for the category, and it will not show the category if it’s not linked to any posts.
That’s all you need to do. When you use the WordPress search, it will show any content with the terms you’re searching for. There’s a slightly different approach available with the Relevanssi plugin. That plugin won’t return the term archive pages directly. However, it will provide search results for posts that are attached to the terms you’re searching for. This screenshot below is from the “Indexing” tab in Relevanssi. The description for the feature is this:
“If you check a taxonomy here, the terms for that taxonomy are indexed with the posts. If you for example choose “post_tag”, searching for a tag will find all posts that have the tag.”
If you’re looking to understand more about how taxonomy data is stored in WordPress and how it can be retrieved, this guide to WordPress taxonomy data will help.