When developing a website, we always start with the very basics and sometimes provide unprofessional posts or pages. Once gained enough experience, your website turns to a better community where you and your user can interact barrierlessly. However, there’ll be one day when you get like a hundred thousand traffics requiring more content on your site to meet the demand. You’ll feel overwhelmed by the number of posts, pages, and media files. Also, if some data on the site needs to be adjusted or is moved unexpectedly, it would be a nightmare to find them for further purposes. It’s time you wish to have an automatic method to search and replace databases.
Unfortunately, WordPress’s default settings couldn’t help you, but some plugins in its repository can handle it amazingly. The problem can be solved quickly by tech-savvy users or those who are comfortable with coding. If you’re not one of them, don’t worry. In this article, we will introduce the best plugins that help you not only search and replace data but also protect them entirely.
Let’s get started!
- When Should You Use Search and Replace Databases Plugin?
- Prevent Direct Access Gold
- Better Search Replace
- Search & Place
- Real-Time Find and Replace
- Enable Media Replace
When Should You Use Search and Replace Databases Plugin?
As a WordPress website owner, one of the responsibilities that you need to take over is managing the site database. It wouldn’t be a big problem if you only have a few posts or products. Finding those error files and fixing them don’t eat up your time that much.
What if you own hundreds of posts and media files published a decade ago? Renaming certain products or adding extra features to these files will lead to the unmatch and conflict with existing files. To avoid this trouble, you can perform a bulk action of searching and replacing all of them.
More than anyone, you must know how precious your time is. Don’t waste time going back to every post and page, looking for the errored ones, and replacing them. It doesn’t sound appealing, and suitable for this 4.0 era.
Especially when WordPress offers better solutions with its plugins, there are no reasons why not take advantage of them effectively.
5 Best WordPress Search and Replace Databases Plugins
Typing “search and replace” in the search box of the WordPress plugin ecosystem, you will receive nearly 50 pages of results. To reduce your stress, the detailed review of the top 5 plugins below will help you make up your mind to choose the most suitable ones.
Prevent Direct Access Gold
This plugin is popular with a lot of WordPress experts with its outstanding protection features. Prevent Direct Access (PDA) Gold protects unlimited file types uploaded on your website, from png, jpeg, mp3, mp4, to pdf, and more.
Once those files are secured, unauthorized users are no longer be able to access these items directly through their URLs or on Google search. It’s because the plugin blocks Google from indexing the shielded files and lets you restrict access based on user roles.
Since a lot of you guys have installed this plugin to your site, and you should do if you haven’t done it yet, there are some conflicts that may happen with the protected files you need to be aware of.
As soon as you protect all the files in your Media Library, items already embedded in the old posts will be shown as an error. With thousands of files attached to different posts, it would be painful to go back to every single one to replace them all.
Understanding what challenges and stresses users, PDA Gold has another feature to back them up to deal with it swiftly. In your admin dashboard, look for the plugin settings and enable the Search and Replace feature. And that’s it.
You might leave the box empty to let the plugins update all the files. Or else, choose specific posts and pages to perform the command.
With the protected files that haven’t embedded into any posts yet, feel free to go ahead and do it normally. The “missing files” issue only happens to the existing posts.
By using the_content filter instead of replacing URLs in the dashboard, PDA Gold knows how to make use of that method to shorten the steps and increase the effectiveness.
Better Search Replace
The benefits this open-source plugin provides are beyond what you might ask for. With over 1 million active installations, Better Search Replace has a firm position in users’ beliefs. If each plugin covers certain parts of searching and replacing files, it’s proud of the ability to consolidate all the best features of its competitors.
For example, it encourages you to select specific tables of a database, run a “dry-run” to see what fields will be updated or applied to WordPress Multisite.
Using the Pro version, you can see exactly what’s changed during a search and replacement process. On top of that, the plugin enables you to backup and import the database while running the procedure.
Search & Place
This powerful plugin is focusing on how to help users search and replace databases safely and quickly. Search and Replace supports more than 11 different languages facilitating its spread with over 200,000 active installations. The plugin automatically localizes your area and suggests a suitable language.
This open-source plugin assists you to search and replace data in your WordPress thoroughly. Also, handling serialized data and changing the domain of WordPress installation could be taken good care of by the plugin without any hassle.
What’s more lovely about Search & Place? The developers don’t need you to donate. Just simply leave your good words in the review as a cheerful treat to them.
Real-Time Find and Replace
The feature that Real-Time Find and Replace provides is super dynamic. You are able to find and replace text in your content in real-time without affecting the existing themes or plugins installed on the website.
Over a hundred thousand users have found this plugin effective, especially in improving SEO. By changing the content to match SEO requirements, you can enhance the interaction of certain pages or posts with Google.
With less than $10, you can own the pro version consisting of a bunch of advanced features, for example, tweaking a text on a product, or removing footer text from a theme.
Enable Media Replace
Enable Media Replace helps you to replace media files in two effective ways. Just upload the same file type as the one you are replacing and the plugin will remain the name of the attachment to reduce conflict with the existing file on the published posts or pages. Or, you can check the option to replace the old file by uploading the new file name. The plugin will change the links leading to the old items to the new ones.
If you have hundreds of media files on your library and a lot of them need to be updated, then this plugin is a must-have, especially for larger WordPress sites. The new update also allows you to preview the replaced images on that page or post.
This plugin is well compatible with several site optimization plugins such as ShortPixel Image Optimization, or Resize Image After Upload plugin, which is good for your SEO.
Get Rid of All the Old and Confusion Ones for the Better
Updating your website is necessary after operating for a while. However, with a vast number of uploaded files over the years, it wouldn’t be an easy task. Since WordPress doesn’t have any features with the default settings to help you promote the process, you must find the rescue from other sources.
The suggested 5 plugins in the article are proved the most effective and simplest ways to search and replace data on your website. Differing from other plugins, Prevent Direct Access Gold even covers the protection aspect, the extremely important part that you should never underestimate. With one click to enable the search and replace feature, the plugin will find the unprotected files and replace them with the secured ones.
Better Search Replace, Real-time Find, and Replace have been popular for a long time and get a huge amount of installations. They’re all worth it for you to take a shot. Or you are focusing on refreshing the look of your site by updating media files, Enable Media Replace helps you to replace thousands of files with ease.
