Add your meta Fields to the WordPress Default Search

after a few months of working with cpts and meta fields I realized that all the text that are in meta fields will not show up on search results with Wordpress’ default search bar. I searched online and found a simple fix for this:

You need to add the following snippet to your functions.php (or with a snippet plugin) :

<?php /** * Extend WordPress search to include custom fields * * https://adambalee.com */ /** * Join posts and postmeta tables * * http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/posts_join */ function cf_search_join( $join ) { global $wpdb; if ( is_search() ) { $join .=‘ LEFT JOIN ‘.$wpdb->postmeta. ‘ ON ‘. $wpdb->posts . ‘.ID = ‘ . $wpdb->postmeta . ‘.post_id ‘; } return $join; } add_filter(‘posts_join’, ‘cf_search_join’ ); /** * Modify the search query with posts_where * * http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/posts_where */ function cf_search_where( $where ) { global $pagenow, $wpdb; if ( is_search() ) { $where = preg_replace( “/\(\s*”.$wpdb->posts.“.post_title\s+LIKE\s*(\'[^\’]+\’)\s*\)/”, “(“.$wpdb->posts.“.post_title LIKE $1) OR (“.$wpdb->postmeta.“.meta_value LIKE $1)”, $where ); } return $where; } add_filter( ‘posts_where’, ‘cf_search_where’ ); /** * Prevent duplicates * * http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/posts_distinct */ function cf_search_distinct( $where ) { global $wpdb; if ( is_search() ) { return “DISTINCT”; } return $where; } add_filter( ‘posts_distinct’, ‘cf_search_distinct’ );

Make sure you either have a child theme installed when modifying the functions.php, otherwise I suggest you use this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/code-snippets/

This code was found on: https://adambalee.com/search-wordpress-by-custom-fields-without-a-plugin/ .. he explaines perfectly what each piece of the code does… so big thanks to Adam!