Why I can't search for locations that contains words with less than 4 letters (San, St, etc)?
NOTE: The instruction provided below is technical, and if you are not a developer or a technical person, then please consult with your hosting provider.
This issue happens because of the "ft_min_word_len" variable in your server's MySQL Configurations.
It's set to the default value of 4, which ignores any word shorter than 4 characters.
You need to change this value to 2 so all your searches that contain values less than 4 letters work properly (like San Juan, Los Angeles, etc).
(Set it to a lesser value like 1 is not recommended, Because it may cause performance issues)
To do so (Root access to the server is required):
1- Edit your MySQL configuration at /etc/my.cnf and add the following line at the end of the file:ft_min_word_len=2
(If the variable is already there, just change its value to 2)
Note: If your website is a Bitnami app, the MySQL configuration file is on a different path:
/opt/bitnami/mysql/my.cnf
2- Restart MySQL server
on cPanel based servers:sudo /scripts/restartsrv_mysql
On Bitnami stack:sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart mysql
on generic servers (You may need to use mariadb instead of mysql):sudo service mysql restart
3- Confirm the value has changed with the following SQL commandSHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'ft_min_word_len';
4- Repair the WPL properties table to rebuild the indexes:REPAIR TABLE `wp_wpl_properties`
(If Wordpress's database prefix is different, make changes accordingly)