Last Updated on April 20, 2022 by Mike
WordPress. You may love it, you may hate it (why?), but it’s a reality for most of us anymore. From blogs to full blown websites, WordPress has become a staple in the world of web design/development/mastering. What can be an issue from time to time is the rather unusual nature of the folder and file structure, where a site wide WordPress search and replace tool would come in very handy.
So for those of us in the world of WordPress SEO services, sometimes you run into the dilemma of trying to move an entire subdirectory. Sure, you can easily change that within the permalinks, but what about the associated media files? Honestly, any time you make wholesale changes to WordPress you set yourself up for the potential “Holy @#$%, {insert anything related to your website here} is broken…what do I do?”
I’ve moved blog directories before and had to change everything by hand or try to make some complicated htaccess change or annoy developers trying to do it via SQL. None of these are any fun, I promise you. Last week I had the good fortune of having the very smart folks over at Prowebmarketing.com make me aware of the fabulous plugin that carries the straightforward name: Search and Replace. Want to move 500 image files to a new directory? No problem. I moved three subdirectories and fixed the media files in seconds. Here’s the deal.
- Back up your database! I love this plugin, but always back up before making mass changes!
- Download the plugin at the link above
- Go to Tools>Available tools>Search and replace in your WordPress Dashboard
- Do a search for the items that you want to find (use the * as a wildcard where necessary)
- Check to see if the identified items match what you were targeting, then fill out the find and replace fields again and set it loose
- Head to your site>Refresh>Watch your files work again
Search. Replace. Take a nap.
Have you tried other find and replace plugins? We’re interested in seeing what successes and failures others have had with similar plugins.
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