Search and replace across your site

Ask Lumi to swap old text for new inside a page, post or layout, and check the draft before you publish it.

Search and replace swaps one piece of text for another inside a page, post, component or layout: an old phone number, a changed opening time, a brand name. This page covers what it can reach, how to run it, and how to check the result before your visitors see it.

There is no search-and-replace button in the app. It is something you ask Lumi to do, or something an AI tool you have connected can do on your behalf. If you are editing a single page by hand, the visual editor is quicker.

What it can change

Search and replace works on one item at a time: one page, or one post, or one component. It is not a site-wide sweep. To change the same wording in five pages, it has to run five times, once per page.

It can reach the text and the styling of:

  • Pages, components, layouts and error pages
  • Blog posts: the body and the excerpt
  • Forms: their styling
  • Global code: the custom CSS and JavaScript that applies across your whole site
  • Blog design templates

Because global code and layouts apply to many pages at once, a replacement there does have site-wide reach even though the operation itself touches a single item. Treat those two as the risky ones.

How to run it

Ask Lumi in plain English, for example, "change the phone number on the contact page from 555-0100 to 555-0199". Lumi finds the page and makes the swap.

Be specific about which page or post you mean. Naming the item avoids Lumi guessing wrong and editing something you did not intend.

Why it sometimes refuses

Search and replace is deliberately cautious, and it will stop rather than guess:

  • The text was not found. Nothing is changed. Usually this means the wording is slightly different from what you described, or the page has changed since it was last read.
  • The text was found more than once. By default it refuses instead of changing all of them, and asks for more surrounding text to pin down which one you meant. Replacing every copy is possible, but it has to be asked for explicitly.

Both of these are protections. If Lumi tells you it could not make a change for one of these reasons, nothing was written.

Check it before you publish

This is the important part. Replacements are written to your draft, not to your live site. Your published pages are untouched until you publish them yourself.

That gives you a safety net, but only if you use it:

  1. Open the page or post that was changed and read the section that was edited.
  2. Preview it to confirm nothing else moved or broke. A replacement that catches part of a link or a style rule can change the look of a page, not just its words.
  3. Only then publish.

There is no preview of the change before it is written and no confirmation step, so reviewing the draft afterwards is your check. Be especially careful with short or common phrases. A word that appears inside a web address or a style rule as well as in your visible text can be replaced in both places.

Undoing a replacement

If a replacement went wrong and you have not published yet, your live site was never affected. Fix the draft, either by asking Lumi to swap the text back or by editing it yourself, and then publish.

If you already published, use version history to go back to how the page looked before the change. Every publish is saved as a version you can restore.

For anything large or uncertain, make the change on a staging site first, look at it there, and promote it once you are happy.

Last updated September 8, 2026