SearchWP was designed and built to make searching your WordPress site comprehensive. A popular way to save time and effort when it comes to adding new features to your site is to use Shortcodes.
Shortcodes are essentially macros for WordPress. Many complex features can be added to your WordPress site with a single Shortcode. For instance, when adding an image gallery to a page on your site:
Inserting an image Gallery into a Page
There is a lot of important content included in this gallery! For example:
- Image filenames
- Image descriptions
- Image alt text
All of this is powered by an image gallery Shortcode, however. We can switch to the Text tab to see what that means:
The Shortcode powering this image gallery, this is all native WordPress search uses!
WordPress native search doesn’t see all of the content you added to your gallery, it only sees:
[gallery ids="339,340,341,342,343,344,345"]
SearchWP was built to process that Shortcode when it builds your index, allowing for all of that image gallery content to be searchable!
This functionality is not enabled by default (to protect against unwanted Shortcode expansion) but it can be enabled by ticking the checkbox to do so on the Advanced tab of the SearchWP settings screen and rebuilding the index.
