How to Search WP Posts Content on Backend

What Will I Learn?

This tutorial demonstrates a quick way to improve the search results on the backend of WordPress to include the posts with the search query in post content to search results as well.

Requirements:

• Basic CSS & HTML knowledge;
• Basic WordPress knowledge.

Working Code Example

By default, the search results on the edit.php page in WordPress only show posts that match the search query in the post title. To include post content in the search results, you will need to modify the code in your theme.

Here’s a sample code you can add to your theme’s functions.php file to include post content in the search results:

function modify_search_query( $query ) {
    if ( !is_admin() && $query->is_search )
        $query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'page', 'your_post_type' ) );
    return $query;
}
add_filter( 'pre_get_posts', 'modify_search_query' );

This code will modify the default search query in WordPress to include post content in addition to post titles. Note that you may need to adjust the post type to include any custom post types you may have on your site.