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  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.