WebEquipe PDF Search

WebEquipe PDF Search indexes your PDF files and makes their text fully searchable. When visitors search your site, they see instant results from both your posts/pages and the content hidden inside your PDFs. Search returns one clean result per PDF with a smart excerpt from the best-matching page.

The plugin interface is available in English, French, German, Dutch, and Swedish, loading automatically to match your WordPress language.

Looking for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned documents? While the free version indexes standard text-based PDFs, WebEquipe PDF Search Pro brings advanced Cloud OCR capabilities directly to WordPress, allowing you to index and search scanned image PDFs, historical archives, and photo-only documents seamlessly.

Video

Watch our feature overview to see standard indexing and Pro Cloud OCR capabilities in action:

Supported PDFs & OCR Compatibility

• Standard Text PDFs: Works flawlessly out of the box with digital PDFs exported from Word, Google Docs, InDesign, etc. File size default 50MB, configurable up to 500MB in PDF Search → Settings.
• Mixed Layout PDFs: If some pages contain extractable text and others are image-only, indexing succeeds with an admin warning; core search covers the native text pages.
• Scanned or Image PDFs: Image-only or scanned PDFs with no embedded text are marked Error in the free version. To make these searchable, WebEquipe PDF Search Pro uses automated OCR to extract and index the text for you.
• Protected Files: Password-protected PDFs cannot be indexed.

Keep Private PDFs Out of Search

Need to hide or protect certain PDFs? The free version lets you use Exclude so a PDF is never indexed and never appears in search—even when you run “Re-index All PDFs” or bulk index. Excluded PDFs stay in your Media Library; they just won’t be searchable. Use Include later to allow indexing again. You can exclude or include PDFs from the Media Library or from PDF Search → Manage PDFs.

Looking for Restricted or Member-Only Search? (Pro Feature)
If you want to keep documents indexed but restrict who can see them, WebEquipe PDF Search Pro includes a Private PDF Search feature. This allows you to index files and mark them as Private so that only logged-in users can find them in search results. Logged-out or public visitors will never see them, making it perfect for member directories, internal company handbooks, and premium resources.

How to Use

1. Install and activate the plugin.
2. Open PDF Search in the WordPress admin sidebar (Dashboard is the home screen).
3. Click Re-index All PDFs on the Dashboard or PDF Search → Index Activity to index existing PDFs (new uploads are indexed automatically when Enable PDF Indexing is on).
4. Use your site’s search or add the shortcode [webequipe_pdf_search_form] on a page—PDFs will appear in results when Enable Search Integration is enabled.

Use PDF Search → Manage PDFs to scan the library, filter by status, and run bulk actions. Use PDF Search → Index Activity to review indexing runs, export a CSV log, or start another full re-index.

Settings at a Glance

All options are under PDF Search → Settings:

• General – Enable PDF indexing on upload, include PDFs in WordPress search, maximum file size (50MB default), search result excerpt length.
• Indexing options – Batch size (PDFs per re-index step), pages per batch (background page steps), page index threshold (when large PDFs switch to page-by-page indexing), max page content length (0 = unlimited; re-index after changing).
• Search display options – Show or hide PDF icon, file size, page count, last updated date, author, thumbnail preview, and summary/snippet text in search results.
• Advanced – Debug logging, memory limit, processing timeout, background processing, delete data on uninstall.

Read the full description on the official page →