Footnotes Made Easy

Footnotes Made Easy is a simple but powerful plugin for adding footnotes to your WordPress posts and pages. Wrap any text in double parentheses, and it becomes a footnote; automatically numbered, linked, and displayed at the bottom of your content.

Full documentation is available at docs.altvisewp.com/footnotes-made-easy

Key features:

• Simple inline syntax — wrap text in (( )) to create a footnote anywhere in a post or page
• Combine identical footnotes automatically
• Paginated post support with manual start number control
• Reference a previous footnote by number using ((ref:1))
• Pretty tooltips — show footnote content on hover using jQuery
• Suppress footnotes on specific page types (home, archives, search, feeds)
• Exclude footnotes from specific post categories or custom URLs
• Dashboard with live usage stats; footnote counts across all posts and pages
• Export/import Footnotes Made Easy settings across different sites
• Multisite support; network-managed mode or per-subsite override
• Compatible with the Classic Editor and the Gutenberg block editor
• Lots of configuration options

Footnotes Made Easy is a fork of WP Footnotes, a plugin by Simon Elvery.

For the latest code, planned enhancements and known issues, visit the GitHub page.

Getting Started

Creating a footnote is simple; wrap your footnote text in double parentheses:

The footnote will appear at the bottom of your post or page, automatically numbered and linked.

Important: Include a space before your opening double parentheses or the footnote will not work.

Settings

The settings page is organised into four tabs:

• Display — Control footnote identifier style, back-link format, header and footer text, and tooltip behaviour.
• Behaviour — Configure combining identical footnotes, back-link position, and processing priority.
• Suppress — Choose which page types (home, archives, search, feeds, previews) should not display footnotes. Also suppress by post type and exclude footnotes from specific URLs or post categories
• Advanced — Change the opening and closing delimiters.

Paginated Posts

By default, each page of a paginated post restarts footnote numbering from 1. To maintain a continuous sequence, add a start number tag between each <!--nextpage--> marker:

Replace 5 with the number you want the first footnote on that page to start at.

Referencing

To reference a previous footnote a second time, you can either repeat the exact same text (recommended — works with the Combine Identical Footnotes option) or use the number reference syntax:

Note: number referencing does not work across pages in a paginated post, and risks pointing to the wrong footnote if new footnotes are inserted before it. The exact-text method is more robust.

Multisite Support

On WordPress multisite networks, the plugin can be configured from the network admin in two modes:

• Network managed — all settings controlled centrally; the Footnotes menu is hidden from subsite admins
• Subsite override — each subsite admin can manage their own footnote settings independently

Available in 8 Languages

Footnotes Made Easy is fully internationalised and ready for translation.

Thanks to the following translators:

• David Artiss, English (UK)
• Mark Robson, English (UK)
• Annabelle W, English (UK)
• maboroshin, Japanese
• Laurent MILLET, French (France)
• B. Cansmile Cha, Korean
• danbilabs, Korean
• denelan, Dutch
• Peter Smits, Dutch
• Pieterjan Deneys, Dutch (Belgium)
• Alex Grey, Russian

To add a translation, visit the Translating WordPress page.