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

Upgrade to Footnotes Made Easy Pro

Need to cite sources properly? Footnotes Made Easy Pro turns your footnotes into a full academic referencing system, built right on top of the free plugin you already use.

Pro features:

• Academic citations — format references in APA, MLA, and Chicago styles automatically
• 10 source types — books, journals, websites, newspapers, films, theses, and more, each formatted correctly for every style
• DOI & ISBN auto-fetch — paste a DOI or ISBN and the source details (title, author, publisher, year) fill in for you
• Reusable Citation Library — save a reference once and reuse it across any post; search, filter, and insert in seconds
• Gutenberg sidebar panel — manage, edit, and insert footnotes directly from the block editor sidebar
• Priority support — direct help from the AltviseWP team

Everything in the free plugin keeps working exactly as it does today — Pro simply adds the citation and referencing tools on top.

Get Footnotes Made Easy Pro →

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:

This is a sentence ((and this is your footnote)).

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:

<!--startnum=5-->

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:

((ref:1))

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.

Footnotes Made Easy can be found and installed via the Plugin menu within WordPress administration (Plugins → Add New). Alternatively, download from WordPress.org and install manually:

1. Upload the entire footnotes-made-easy folder to your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress administration.

No configuration required — the plugin works immediately after activation with the default (( )) syntax.