WordPress search is a basic search feature that searches posts, pages, and custom post types. The search results are displayed in a similar way to an archive page with a title and content. Once the search is completed, the user will have to look for the section that contains the search term in the results. This is unnecessary overhead for the user that wastes time. In an ideal implementation, the user should be able to see the searched word within the results.

We can implement this to improve usability by highlighting the search term within search results. The default search doesn't provide such a feature, and hence we need a custom implementation.

In this recipe, we are going to use a plugin from the WordPress plugin repository to highlight the search terms in the search results.