Lucid Search & Replace – Safe Database Find and Replace with Preview and Undo

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Changing a domain, moving off a staging URL, or switching to HTTPS means rewriting text all through your database. Most tools do it blind: you type into a box, press go, and hope. When the value is serialized (theme settings, Elementor layouts, WooCommerce data) a plain replace miscounts the length prefix and corrupts the row, and there is no way back.

Lucid Search & Replace is built the other way around. You preview representative matches before anything is written, can take a safety snapshot, and can undo the run afterwards in one click. Nothing about that is held behind an upgrade.

What makes it safe

• Visual preview, always free. Up to 20 representative matches per table, grouped by table and column, with the exact characters that change highlighted. Review them, then decide.
• Serialized-data safe. The engine walks serialized arrays and objects, replaces inside them, and recalculates the s:N byte-length prefixes so the value stays valid.
• Handles the case other tools miss. Page builders store URLs as JSON inside serialized data, with escaped slashes (http:\/\/). A search for http:// never matches that, so the old link silently survives. This engine decodes the JSON, replaces, and re-encodes in the original style. Base64-wrapped values are handled the same way.
• Undo a search replace. When the snapshot is enabled at confirmation, affected cells are copied before each write, and the success screen offers a one-click undo. It restores cells that still contain the applied value and reports later edits as conflicts, so a bad replace stops being a disaster.
• Protected by default. Network-global, user, and login tables are excluded from site-level runs. Post GUIDs are left alone unless you ask, because changing them breaks feeds and comments.

Built for real sites

• Background batching for large databases. Work runs in bounded batches through Action Scheduler and resumes from durable progress after each completed batch.
• One URL move covers every stored form. When you replace one absolute URL with another, an optional switch also rewrites the https/http twin, protocol-relative //links, and the JSON-escaped (http:\/\/) and percent-encoded (https%3A%2F%2F) forms page builders leave in content, so no old link survives on a technicality.
• Regex, case sensitivity, and exclusions for precise control, all optional behind an Advanced panel so a first-time user is never overwhelmed.
• Target specific tables while safely discovering their text columns, or scan every eligible site table.
• Automatic cache purge after a run. Regenerates Elementor CSS and clears WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, and W3 Total Cache so the site does not keep serving old URLs.
• Downloadable CSV of retained preview excerpts, streamed through an authorized admin route when change logs are enabled.
• WP-CLI for scripted and staged migrations.
• Multisite aware.

A note on the paid product

The search and replace here is complete and free. If you are moving an entire site rather than rewriting text, SafeGuard handles full migrations with scheduled off-site backups. It is mentioned in the plugin’s own Pro Tools tab and nowhere else. You never need it to use everything on this page.

Source code and build process

The full, uncompiled source lives at https://github.com/ibrahimhajjaj/lucid-search-replace

The admin screen is a TypeScript and React application under src/. The shipped build/index.js and build/style-index.css are generated from it with @wordpress/scripts (webpack). To reproduce them from a checkout:

composer install
npm install
npm run build

npm run package assembles the distributed zip. Translation templates are regenerated with `npm run make-pot`.

Bundled third-party library: Action Scheduler by Automattic (GPL-3.0-or-later), https://github.com/woocommerce/action-scheduler, installed under vendor/ via Composer and used for background batch processing.