Scott Reilly

This plugin prevents WordPress from allowing and handling any search requests from the front-end of the site. Specifically, this plugin:
<ul>
<li>Prevents the search form from appearing if the theme uses the standard <code>get_search_form()</code> function to display the search form.</li>
<li>Prevents the search form from appearing if the theme uses a <code>searchform.php</code> template</li>
<li>Prevents the search item from appearing in the admin tool bar when shown on the front-end.</li>
<li>Disables the search widget.
<ul>
<li>Removes the Search widget from the list of available widgets</li>
<li>Deactivates any search widgets currently in use in any sidebars (they are hidden, not deleted; they’ll reappear in their original locations if this plugin gets deactivated)</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Disables the search block.
<ul>
<li>Removes the Search block from the list of available blocks</li>
<li>Deactivates any search blocks currently in use, such as in posts or as a widget (they are disabled, not deleted; they’ll reappear if this plugin gets deactivated and the associated placeholder block doesn’t get deleted)</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>With or without a search form, the plugin prevents any direct or manual requests by visitors, via either GET or POST requests, from actually returning any search results.</li>
<li>Submitted attempts at a search will be given a 404 File Not Found response, rendered by your site’s 404.php template, if present.</li>
<li>Disables output of <code>SearchAction</code> in SEO schema by the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/" rel="ugc">Yoast SEO</a> plugin.</li>
</ul>
The plugin only affects search on the front-end of the site. It does not disable searching in the admin section of the site.
Links: <a href="https://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/disable-search/" rel="nofollow ugc">Plugin Homepage</a> | <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-search/" rel="ugc">Plugin Directory Page</a> | <a href="https://github.com/coffee2code/disable-search/" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a> | <a href="https://coffee2code.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Author Homepage</a>

Disable Search


In 2024, numerous bots are crawling sites, generating significant search spam. Generally, site search incurs high costs, primarily because we end up paying for CPU resources consumed by spam.



If site search is not crucial for your website, I recommend activating this plugin.



Thank you, Scott, for maintaining this simple yet effective plugin!


The most effective way to avoid search spam

Disable the built-in front-end search capabilities of WordPress.

This plugin allows you to easily define text or HTML that should be used in your posts in place of words or phrases that are actually present in the posts. This is a handy technique for creating shortcuts to common, lengthy, or frequently changing text/HTML, or for smilies.
Additional features of the plugin controlled both via settings and filters:
<ul>
<li>Text replacement can be enabled for comments (it isn’t by default)</li>
<li>Text replacement can be made case insensitive (it is case sensitive by default)</li>
<li>Text replacement can be limited to doing only one replacement per term, per post (by default, all occurrences of a term are replaced)</li>
<li>Text replacement can be handled early or late in WordPress’s text filtering process (it’s early by default)</li>
<li>Text replacement can be expanded to affect other filters</li>
</ul>
A few things to keep these things in mind:
<ul>
<li>
Your best bet with defining shortcuts is to define something that would never otherwise appear in your text. For instance, bookend the shortcut with colons:
:wp: => <a href='https://wordpress.org' rel="ugc">WordPress</a> 
:aol: => <a href='http://www.aol.com' rel="nofollow ugc">America Online, Inc.</a>
</li>
</ul>
Otherwise, you risk proper but undesired replacements:
<pre><code>Hi => Hello
</code></pre>
Would have the effect of changing “His majesty” to “Hellos majesty”.
<ul>
<li>
If you intend to use this plugin to handle smilies, you should probably disable WordPress’s default smilie handler on the Writing Settings admin page.
</li>
<li>
This plugin is set to filter ‘the_content’, ‘the_excerpt’, ‘widget_text’, and optionally, ‘get_comment_text’ and ‘get_comment_excerpt’. Filters from popular plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and Elementor are also handled by default (see FAQ for specifics). The “More filters” setting can be used to specify additional filters that should be handled by the plugin. The filter ‘c2c_text_replace_filters’ can also be used to add or modify the list of filters affected.
</li>
<li>
Text inside of HTML tags (such as tag names and attributes) will not be matched. So, for example, you can’t expect the :mycss: shortcut to work in <code><a href="" style=":mycss:">text</a></code>
</li>
<li>
SPECIAL CONSIDERATION: Be aware that the shortcut text that you use in your posts will be stored that way in the database. While calls to display the posts will see the filtered, text-replaced version, anything that operates directly on the database will not see the expanded replacement text. So if you only ever referred to “America Online” as “:aol:” (where <code>:aol: => <a href='http://www.aol.com'>America Online</a></code>), visitors to your site will see the linked, expanded text due to the text replace, but a database search would never turn up a match for “America Online”.
</li>
<li>
However, a benefit of the replacement text not being saved to the database and instead evaluated when the data is being loaded into a web page is that if the replacement text is modified, all pages making use of the shortcut will henceforth use the updated replacement text.
</li>
</ul>
Links: <a href="https://coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/text-replace/" rel="nofollow ugc">Plugin Homepage</a> | <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/text-replace/" rel="ugc">Plugin Directory Page</a> | <a href="https://github.com/coffee2code/text-replace/" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub</a> | <a href="https://coffee2code.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Author Homepage</a>
<h3>Developer Documentation</h3>
Developer documentation can be found in <a href="https://github.com/coffee2code/text-replace/blob/master/DEVELOPER-DOCS.md" rel="nofollow ugc">DEVELOPER-DOCS.md</a>. That documentation covers the numerous hooks provided by the plugin. Those hooks are listed below to provide an overview of what’s available.
<ul>
<li><code>c2c_text_replace_filters</code> : Customize what hooks get text replacement applied to them.</li>
<li><code>c2c_text_replace_third_party_filters</code> : Customize what third-party hooks get text replacement applied to them.</li>
<li><code>c2c_text_replace_filter_priority</code> : Override the default priority for the ‘c2c_text_replace’ filter.</li>
<li><code>c2c_text_replace</code> Customize or override the setting defining all of the text replacement shortcuts and their replacements.</li>
<li><code>c2c_text_replace_comments</code> : Customize or override the setting indicating if text replacement should be enabled in comments.</li>
<li><code>c2c_text_replace_case_sensitive</code> : Customize or override the setting indicating if text replacement should be case sensitive.</li>
<li><code>c2c_text_replace_once</code> : Customize or override the setting indicating if text replacement should be limited to once per term per piece of text being processed regardless of how many times the term appears.</li>
</ul>

Text Replace

Replace text with other text. Handy for creating shortcuts to common, lengthy, or frequently changing text/HTML, or for smilies.

Disable Search vs Text Replace