Managing an effective WordPress website takes a lot of work. In addition to keeping content fresh, staying up-to-date with security patches and plugins, and optimizing for search engine rankings, you also have to make sure that any edits you make to the content of your website don’t create a broken link issue. The ability to replace text is a vital step to making sure all of the links, images, and content remain uninterrupted, even if you make a major change in the wording.
In a large WordPress website finding and replacing an individual word can be a nightmare, and often you have to rely on 3rd party plugins and for complex cases, you might have to directly interact with the database.
The Nexter Extension (free) plugin has a built-in feature that allows you to change text or even paragraphs on your website.
To replace a text on your WordPress website, go to Appearance > Nexter Settings > Extra Options.
Then scroll down to the Replace URL section and click the Settings button.
It will open a popup, from here, you can replace texts.
Note: Before replacing Texts of your site you should backup your database as a safety measure just in case anything goes wrong, as these tasks directly affect the database.
In the Replace URL popup, you’ll see all the database tables are selected in the Select Tables field. You can select specific database tables from the dropdown as well, so only there the search and replace function will work.
Then, you’ll see two fields Old Text and New Text.
In the Old Text field, you have to add the URL that you want to replace and in the New Text field, the URL that you want to replace it with.
You can check the Case Sensitive checkbox if something is case-sensitive.
If you want to change data from the ‘guid’ column of the table you can check the Replace GUIDs checkbox.
You can also limit the number of search query rows from the Search Limit field. You should set a lower value if you are facing server timeout issues while doing the search and replace.
For example, you have the word WordPress written as “Wordpress” on your site and you want to replace it with the word “WordPress (CMS)” throughout the site.
If you don’t want to run the query on all the database tables you can select a specific database table as well for instance, if you want to replace the URL only in the posts then you can select the post table.
Then, you have to write the word Wordpress in the Old Text field and the word WordPress (CMS) in the New Text field and check the Case Sensitive checkbox to make sure it doesn’t replace the word wordpress in any URL accidentally.
Then click on the Replace button. It will show how many words it found with Wordpress.
Finally, click on the Confirm button to replace the old Text with the new Text.
So this is how simply you can replace a text or a group of words with a click in WordPress using the Nexter theme.
And if you want to learn how to replace URLs in WordPress, check this link.
