SOLVED: How to Easily Bulk Edit / Search and Replace Text or Links In WordPress

If you have to change text or update links in many of your WordPress pages, there is a simple solution with BETTER SEARCH REPLACE.

We recently removed a YouTube video player that required all of our YouTube links to be prefixed with httpv:// (not the ‘V’) .  The plug-in is now dead because WordPress now supports YouTube links directly but we had literally hundreds of pages with httpv://youtube.com/<whateva'> that we needed to change to https://youtube.com/<whateva'>  .  After searching for things like “bulk edit wordpress”, “correct links in wordpress”, “change text on multiple posts in wordpress” we gave up posted the issue with in the WordPress support forum.  Bingo, my man @sterndata nailed it by suggesting a simple plug in named BETTER SEARCH REPLACE.

Here is how you use it… yes it is obvious but someone always asks questions, so we thought the screen shot and details would help:

1. In your WordPress sites PLUGINS section search for, install then activate, Better Search Replace
2. Click TOOLS > BETTER SEARCH REPLACE
3. In the SEARCH FOR, enter the text you want to change from
4. In the REPLACE WITH, enter the new text
5. In the SELECT TABLES, select the appropriate table
   • in our case we only wanted to change POSTS so we selected WP_POSTS
6. SUGGESTION: Leave the RUN AS DRY RUN checked so you can get a sense of how much will be changed
7. Click RUN SEARCH/REPLACE

Thanks again to Steve Stern in the WPress Support Forum for suggesting this easy, free fix.