The correct term for these is 'smart quotes'. Which is odd, as there's not a great deal that's smart about them.

For some reason, an out-of-the-box WordPress installation changes straight quotation marks and apostrophes to curly ones. I have no idea what the thinking was behind this decision, but it appears to relate to the wptexturize function.

Typographers would say that smart quotes are, strictly speaking, correct. However, my allegiance isn't to typographers; it's to site users, and making my content findable is the most important thing to me.

I discovered that when searching for a phrase such as don't bother me on another of my sites returned no results. Strange, I thought, as I'd definitely used the phrase in my pages. Then I realised that it was the curly apostrophe that was making it fall outside my results.

With these smart quotes in place, searching for any apostrophe, or a word containing one, returned nothing. Even searching within a page didn't help.

Smart quotes are bad for search engine optimisation since Google et al don't treat them the same as regular quotes. Furthermore, most searchers use regular quotes when searching for something, as it's far harder to type isn’t than isn't. What's more, if your site is called Dave’s Blog, Google may not even see it properly, meaning users won't be able to find you.

I did some digging around, and found that by including the following lines in the header.php file of my site's WordPress theme, my content could be searched more effectively.

<? remove_filter ('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter ('comment_text', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter ('single_post_title', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter ('the_title', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter ('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize'); ?>

Let's put it to the test. You can search (ctrl+f or apple+f) on this page for the word isn't. However, it isn't going to find the word isn’t, as it has a smart apostrophe. Nor will it like “this phrase”, because of the quotation marks.

Come on WordPress, help your users out here.