Title: Search Highlighting
Author: Tobias Bäthge
Published: December 1, 2022
Last modified: May 14, 2025

---

Make the first column an index or counter column with the row position.

# Search Highlighting

In tables with a lot of text, this feature can help discover a search term more 
quickly.

## Feature description

Here is an example: The table is filtered for “Cisco” and highlighting the found
search term in a different color.

  |  Last Name | First Name | Birthday | Company | Phone | ZIP code | Country | Balance | Points | Rating |  
   |  Banks | Travis | 05/04/1969 | Apple | 200-4324 | 64655 | Italy | $61.17 | 8 | 6.6 |  
 |  Cain | Lawrence | 05/16/1994 | IBM | 701-3108 | 98004 | United States | $54.81 | 5 | 2.5 |  
 |  Middleton | Dennis | 01/10/1992 | Google | 580-9501 | 80913 | Spain | $24.83 | 4 | 5.2 |  
 |  Valenzuela | Lunea | 01/09/1966 | Cisco | 970-8655 | 51606 | Germany | $74.07 | 7 | 3.7 |  
 |  Burgess | Quynn | 09/24/1988 | Mozilla | 430-8943 | 78965 | France | $16.13 | 8 | 2.9 |  
 |  Lott | Lillith | 12/10/1978 | Dell | 587-2289 | 88178 | Australia | $30.12 | 1 | 7.9 |  
 |  Freeman | Cheyenne | 01/28/1981 | LG | 396-5473 | 14711 | Germany | $49.82 | 1 | 6.0 |  
 |  Houston | Jorden | 05/03/1978 | Adobe | 970-1182 | 96036 | Canada | $47.31 | 2 | 1.5 |  
 |  Harris | Merritt | 12/29/1989 | Apple | 160-5977 | 25178 | United States | $77.33 | 6 | 0.1 |  
 |  Gregory | Brynn | 01/13/1994 | Adobe | 663-6039 | 91558 | Spain | $90.24 | 9 | 8.2 |  
 |  Curry | Mason | 03/15/1969 | Sony | 115-4778 | 87513 | Australia | $21.68 | 5 | 6.6 |  
 |  Holland | Alyssa | 06/25/1976 | Xerox | 704-4977 | 97921 | Canada | $50.31 | 7 | 9.5 |  
 |  Logan | Shay | 09/13/1968 | IBM | 687-6482 | 03023 | United States | $46.39 | 8 | 7.6 |  
 |  Moran | August | 07/04/1986 | Cisco | 651-1214 | 60737 | India | $22.64 | 1 | 7.5 |  
 |  Vasquez | Kelsey | 03/31/1968 | Samsung | 470-7358 | 79655 | Germany | $84.05 | 3 | 4.5 |  
 |  Stein | Lawrence | 10/15/1960 | Toshiba | 929-5407 | 36044 | Italy | $77.11 | 2 | 8.6 |  
 |  Battle | Wylie | 01/03/1988 | Facebook | 368-2276 | 37585 | Australia | $46.37 | 10 | 2.8 |  
 |  Booker | Logan | 12/16/1975 | Apple | 830-5701 | 22074 | United States | $40.71 | 1 | 9.0 |  
 |  Gilbert | Chaney | 06/06/1970 | Sony | 132-5560 | 89630 | Canada | $78.45 | 9 | 1.2 |  
 |  Buckley | Stone | 09/11/1980 | Cisco | 422-7998 | 74057 | United States | $30.01 | 2 | 7.9 |

You can of course easily adjust the highlight color to something suitable for your
site or theme by using the [Default Style Customizer feature module](https://tablepress.org/modules/default-style-customizer/)!

[Use this feature with a TablePress Premium plan today](https://tablepress.org/pricing/?output_format=md)

## Usage instructions

To use these features with your tables, activate the “Search Highlighting” feature
module on the “Modules” screen of TablePress Pro or TablePress Max. Then, configure
the desired options in the “Search Highlighting” section on the table’s “Edit” screen.

![Screenshot of the "Search Highlighting" configuration section in the TablePress
Premium versions.](https://tablepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/datatables-
searchhighlight.png)

The “Search Highlighting” configuration section in the TablePress Premium versions.

## Configuration parameters

To configure this module’s features, you can also use these [configuration parameters](https://tablepress.org/faq/configuration-parameter-reference/)
in the “TablePress Table” [block](https://tablepress.org/faq/documentation-tablepress-table-block/),
the Elementor widget, or in the [Shortcode](https://tablepress.org/faq/documentation-shortcode-table/)
that you are using to embed the table:

  |  Module | Slug |  | Configuration parameter | Name | Description | Type | Default value |  
   |  Search Highlighting | datatables-searchhighlight |  | datatables_searchhighlight | Search Highlighting | Whether to highlight the current search term in the table. | boolean (`true` or `false`) | `false` |

The “Search Highlighting” feature module is part of the [**TablePress Premium plans**](https://tablepress.org/pricing/?output_format=md).

**On this page**

 1. [Feature description](https://tablepress.org/modules/datatables-searchhighlight/#feature-description)
 2. [Usage instructions](https://tablepress.org/modules/datatables-searchhighlight/#instructions)
 3. [Configuration parameters](https://tablepress.org/modules/datatables-searchhighlight/#configuration)