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.

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. --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.