Footnotes Made Easy for WordPress Plugin Directory

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.