How to find and replace text with one click in your WordPress database

Are you looking to do a bulk search and replace in WordPress? If you want to find and replace a specific text, URL or image, you can do it easily by using the WordPress plugin or a simple SQL query. In this article, we will show you how to find and replace text in your WordPress database.

When do you need to find and replace a WordPress database?

Suppose you have added a specific text or URL to a number of your posts. You don't know which posts you've added that text to, but you do know there are a lot of them.

You can now manually browse your site and edit each individual post one by one. That's going to take time and has a high chance that you'll miss some occurrences.

Using a single command to automatically find and replace will do the same thing but much faster and more efficiently.

However, there is a drawback. If you made a mistake, then you won't be able to undo it. Once you replace the text, it's gone. You'll need to carefully type the text you're looking for and the text you want to replace it with.

With that said, let's see how you can easily find and replace text in your WordPress database.

Getting started

As we mentioned earlier, the changes you make to your database will not be reversible. You must take all precautions to ensure that you do not lose data.

First you need to create a backup of the WordPress database. You can do this using a WordPress backup plugin. Alternatively, you can also create a database backup using phpMyAdmin.

After creating your WordPress database backup, you can move on to running your find and replace commands.

Run Find and Replace with a WordPress Plugin

If you're not familiar with code and don't want to write a custom SQL query, then there's an easy to use and searchable WordPress plugin called Better Search Replace.

It allows you to run search and replace commands from your WordPress admin area. We have a detailed guide on how to search and replace in WordPress with the Better Search Replace plugin.

Running Find &Replace MySQL Query with phpMyAdmin

You can also use phpMyAdmin to find and replace text from your WordPress database.

You must first log in to the cPanel control panel of your WordPress hosting. Scroll down to the database section and then click on phpMyAdmin.

The screenshot above shows the cPanel control panel at BlueHost. Your cPanel control panel may look slightly different.

This will launch phpMyAdmin where you will need to click on your WordPress database name and then click on SQL.

You will need to enter your SQL query in this format:

 actualizar TABLE_NAME establecer FIELD_NAME = reemplazar (FIELD_NAME, 'Texto a buscar', 'texto a reemplazar con'); 

For example, if you want to search for text in the content of a WordPress post, you would write your query like this:

 actualizar wp_posts set post_content = replace (post_content, 'Text to find', 'text to replace with'); 

Click the 'Go' button to continue.

PhpMyAdmin will run your SQL query and on success it will display the number of rows affected by the query.

You can now visit your WordPress site to see your changes in action.

We hope this article helped you learn how to find and replace text with one click in your WordPress database. You may also want to see our beginner's guide to WordPress database administration with phpMyAdmin.

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