The spelling style you choose for your website is part of its identity. It may influence how ‘at home’ readers feel and how easily they can digest the information you provide. Updating a website’s spelling in WordPress requires a pragmatic approach.
Recently, I changed the spelling style across my entire website. Not the words, you understand – just the spelling.
To be clear: there was nothing wrong with the original spelling. I’d had no complaints and nobody had reported any issues with using my website. But I still embarked on this rather fiddly and – as it turned out – time-consuming change.
Let’s explore why I did this and how you can change the spelling across your WordPress website as efficiently as possible.
Why did I change my website’s spelling?
I changed my website’s spelling because I wanted to reflect its current audience. When I started my blog in 2013, my readership quickly became global. But I was quite comfortable continuing to use British -ise spellings to reflect my own location and linguistic roots.
However, when I recently took a look at my website stats as I prepared to launch two upcoming training courses, I realized how much the picture had shifted: around 75% of my readers are now outside the UK.
This created a powerful argument for reconsidering the spellings on my website and for using the new style in my courses from the get-go. My goal was to find the option that would maximize the sense of familiarity for the highest possible numbers of students and readers. I don’t want people to be distracted by spellings: I want them to be able to engage with my courses and read my content without hindrance.
Which spelling style should I choose?
I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable beginning to use US English – it would feel like claiming to be someone I’m not. But I also didn’t want readers used to that spelling style to find my courses or website unnecessarily jarring.
Luckily, I knew what to do from years of advising clients who publish globally. The solution is widely used, and it comes with an excellent pedigree: the Oxford English Dictionary.
You see, British English allows you to use -ize spellings (like in US English) but retains the British spellings of words like ‘colour’, ‘metre’ and ‘travelled’. It also retains the -ys- in ‘analyse’.
This blend of British and US characteristics is why British English with -ize spellings is sometimes called ‘transatlantic English’. Some publishers choose to use it in publications with a global audience, seeing it as a compromise between the UK and US approaches to English spelling.
It’s important to note, though, that -ize spellings are no less British than -ise. A text that uses British English with -ize spellings has not been ‘Americanized’ – after all, Shakespeare frequently used -ize.
I’ve created a handy infographic summarizing the major English spelling styles:
Shifting my spelling identity
Changing from -ise to -ize spellings might not seem like a big deal, but it surprised me how much of a shift it seemed to represent.
I’ve always used -ise spellings. I assume it’s what I was taught at school (although I don’t actually remember!). -ise spellings have always just felt ‘right’ to me.
And I’ve lost count of the number of clients who’ve briefed me to ‘follow Oxford English but with -ise spellings’. For some reason, we Brits venerate our national dictionary but are quite happy to eschew its central distinguishing principle (-ize endings)!
As I write this, I’m getting used to using -ize spellings. I need to retrain my brain and fight my instincts.
But ultimately for me as a professional editor, spellings are just a tool. Just as I’d advise my clients to pick whatever option is right for their audience, I’ve chosen what I believe is right for mine. It doesn’t affect the words I choose, the grammar I employ or the rhythms I select.
And, after all, with that ‘z’ in my name, there’s an argument to be made that this is a homecoming!
How to change the spellings across your WordPress website
At some point you may find yourself wanting to change the spelling style across your whole website.
Maybe you’re in a similar position to me, wanting to acknowledge a shifting readership base. Maybe you’ve decided to narrow your focus to a specific region and want to localize your style accordingly. Maybe you never fixed on a style and would like to start being more consistent.
I investigated several options for changing the spellings across my website – but, spoiler alert: the solution I ultimately chose was extremely low tech.
Checking a page versus updating a whole website
First, let’s be clear about what I wanted to achieve.
There are many tools that can help you check the spellings on a specific page as you’re writing or editing. Most browsers (e.g. Edge or Chrome) have inbuilt spellchecking, where incorrectly spelled words are underlined (usually with a red squiggle). It’s important to go into your browser’s language settings and choose the language variant you use – although bear in mind that most automated spellcheckers are fairly unsophisticated and can’t distinguish between British -ise and British -ize (if you choose ‘British’ or ‘United Kingdom’ spellings, they’ll usually let you use a mixture of -ise and -ize spellings without flagging any errors).
Various browser extensions work in a similar way and many offer additional features.
But with both the in-built tools and browser extensions, as far as I’m aware, you can only check one page at a time. And once you see a red squiggle (or whatever method your tool uses to flag an error), you have to change it yourself manually.
In contrast, what I ideally wanted was a method that would check the spellings across my whole website and then update them semi-automatically.
There are WordPress plugins (tools you install within your WordPress dashboard) that offer to do this. I tried Better Search Replace Pro and Search Regex, both of which are well reviewed. But I struggled to get them to work as I needed.
I suspect either would be excellent for making a few very specific changes across a website (e.g. if you change your business’s trading name and need to update all the existing mentions of your name). But the changes I needed to make were both more broad and more nuanced.
I needed to find all words that may be spelled using either -iz- or -is-, excluding false positives. For example, I needed to find (and replace) the words ‘organisation’, ‘organise’ and ‘organising’, but not the words ‘is’, ‘list’ or ‘satisfaction’. At least as far as I could tell, there was no way to do this with any reasonable degree of efficiency.
Essentially, what I wanted was a browser-based version of PerfectIt, which is a sophisticated tool that truly understands different spelling styles as it is built specifically for editors. But in the absence of this option, I had to find another solution.
How I changed the spelling style across my website
I spent a frankly unjustifiable amount of time researching options and trying to make them work, convinced that in today’s world there must be an elegant solution.
Once I’d abandoned hope of finding a plugin to make the changes for me, I experimented with downloading and saving copies of all my webpages in Word, running PerfectIt on them there, and then manually making the changes back within WordPress. But even on my moderately sized website (about 100 pages and posts at the time of writing), this was taking a ridiculous amount of time.
So, in the end, I did it all manually.
On every page and post, I followed this process:
- Open up the editable version of the page or post in WordPress
- Bring up the basic browser search tool (usually Ctrl + F on a PC)
- Put ‘is’ into the search box and run the search, so as to highlight all instances of these characters
- Look at all the highlights and manually change the ones needing to be changed
In the end, this took a couple of hours (considerably less than the amount of time I’d already wasted trying to find a more techy solution).
I’m convinced that for a website the size of mine, for a one-off change of this nature, this was the most efficient approach. If you have a much bigger website or need to make changes on an ongoing basis, it might benefit you to spend more time researching and setting up a more robust solution, perhaps with the help of a specialist WordPress developer.
But for isolated updates of small to moderate websites, save yourself the hassle: my advice is to roll up your sleeves, dig in and just get it done.
And then, most importantly, be consistent going forward, so you never have to do it again (well, unless you decide to adopt a whole new spelling identity, of course). For me this means checking my text in Word – where I have access to all my specialist editing and consistency tools – before a post or page goes live in WordPress.
What’s your spelling identity? And how do you implement and maintain it on your website? If you’ve found a solution that works well for you, especially if it’s for one-off updates to a small or moderately sized website, please let me know in the comments!
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