Footnotes Made Easy
Footnotes Made Easy
Description
Footnotes Made Easy is a simple, but powerful, method of adding footnotes to your posts and pages.
Key features include…
- Simple footnote insertion via double parentheses
- Combine identical notes
- Solution for paginated posts
- Suppress Footnotes on specific page types
- Option to display ‘pretty’ tooltips using jQuery
- Lots of configuration options
- And much, much more!
Footnotes Made Easy is a fork of WP Footnotes, a plugin by Simon Elvery which was abandoned some years ago.
Please visit the Github page for the latest code development, planned enhancements and known issues.
Getting Started
Creating a footnote is incredibly simple – you just need to include your footnote in double parentheses, such as this…
This is a sentence ((and this is your footnote)).
The footnote will then appear at the bottom of your post/page.
Important note: Make sure you include a space before your opening double parentheses or the footnote won’t work!
Options
You have a fair few options on how the identifier links, footnotes and back-links look which can be found in the WordPress admin area under ‘Settings -> Footnotes’.
Paginated Posts
Some of you seem to like the paginating post, which is kind of problematic. By default, each page of your post will have its own set of footnotes at the bottom and the numbering will start again from 1 for each page.
The only way to get around this is to know how many posts are on each page and tell Footnotes Made Easy what number you want the list to start at for each of the pages. So at some point on each page (that is, between each <!--nextpage--> tag) you need to add a tag to let the plugin know what number the footnotes on this page should start at. The tag should look like this <!--startnum=5--> where “5” is the number you want the footnotes for this page to start at.
Referencing
Sometimes it’s useful to be able to refer to a previous footnote a second (or third, or fourth…) time. To do this, you can either simply insert the exact same text as you did the first time and the identifier should simply reference the previous note. Alternatively, if you don’t want to do all that typing again, you can construct a footnote like this: ((ref:1)) and the identifier will reference the footnote with the given number.
Even though it’s a little more typing, using the exact text method is much more robust. The number referencing will not work across multiple pages in a paged post (but will work within the page). Also, if you use the number referencing system you risk them identifying the incorrect footnote if you go back and insert a new footnote and forget to change the referenced number.
Available in 8 Languages
Footnotes Made Easy is fully internationalized, and ready for translations.
Many thanks to the following translators for their contributions:
- 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
If you would like to add a translation to this plugin then please head to our Translating WordPress page
Installation
Footnotes Made Easy can be found and installed via the Plugin menu within WordPress administration (Plugins -> Add New). Alternatively, it can be downloaded from WordPress.org and installed manually…
- Upload the entire
footnotes-made-easyfolder to yourwp-content/plugins/directory. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress administration.
Voila! It’s ready to go.
Screenshots
The Settings screen with advanced settings shown
Continuation of the settings screen with advanced settings shown
The post editor page showing how to insert footnotes
Live preview of a post page showing footnotes within the page
Live preview of a post page showing the list of footnotes at the bottom of the post
Faq
To add a footnote, surround the footnote text with the opening and closing footnote markers specified in the plugin settings. By default, these are (( and )).
Yes, it can. The easiest way is to use the CSS editor in your theme customizer. For example, ‘ol.footnotes’ refers to the footnotes list in general and ‘ol.footnotes li’ the individual footnotes.
Yes, the plugin provides options to disable footnotes on the home page, archives, search results, feeds, and previews.
Reviews
Great Plugin
By 
Very easy to set up and understand. Makes creating useful, interactive footnotes a total breeze. I found I did not have to leave a space after the last character before the double parentheses for a footnote to work, so am not sure why the caveat is in the procedures and it's grammatically correct anyway to have no space between the text and the footnote number. In any case, the plugin is highly recommended.
Plugin not updated anymore
By 
What do I do with all my footnotes now?
By 
Hello David, I'm sorry to hear you had to discontinue this plugin. But I have a problem now, as I've used footnotes on several of my blogs, the code is now shown in the text which gives a lot of clutter.
Are you aware of another plugin which has the same setup, so I can keep using the shortcode I created? (I used a double (( -- text -- )) )
Thank you,
Yolanda
Update: I've changed the priority to 6 and now it's working again. But I'm still worried about the future.
Very good plugin
By 
Simple and easy to use, works well without bugs.
Excellent plugin - simple yet versatile.
By 
This plugin has been excellent - and deserves its five stars. It works very well. I use it for adding academic style bibliographic references to web pages. I remain impressed with (a) the simplicity of this plugin for inserting footnotes, (b) the way it automatically numbers footnotes, (c) the way it manages duplicated references - such that only one footnote is created in these cases, and (d) the way footnotes themselves can contain a link. It makes adding and amending footnotes effortless.
There was a minor hiatus about four months ago in support for this plugin but everything has been working perfectly since (as it was before). Both developers (David Artiss and Patrick Lumumba) were responsive at that time.
So useful
By 
As somebody who does academic and semi-academic work on my blog, I find this app to be simple to understand, easy to use, and entirely functional. Highly recommended.
Disappointing
By 
The plugin worked with the default settings, but would not save any changes I made to the settings. The developer was initially helpful, but his suggestions did not help, and then he then stopped responding. This seemed like a red flag, so I decided not to use something that was not actively supported.
Works great
By 
Happy with this plugin as a seamless replacement for an old footnotes plugin that had stopped working with php8.
Amazing
By 
amazing
Bootstrap Collapse issue
By 
If you include footnotes inside of bootstrap accordions, only the last accordion processed with properly apply the footnotes to the page. All other footnotes will not render properly.
Otherwise this is a great plugin.
Changelog
I use semantic versioning, with the first release being 1.0.
3.0.9 [November 8, 2025]
- Fix: Footnotes header now correctly appears before the list (not inside it).
- Fix: Restored ‘footnote-link’ CSS class for backward compatibility with custom CSS.
3.0.8 [November 2, 2025]
- CRITICAL SECURITY FIX: CVE-2025-11733 – Fixed unauthenticated stored XSS vulnerability (CVSS 7.2)
- Security: Complete security overhaul with 5-layer protection
- Security: Proper authentication, CSRF protection, input sanitization, and output escaping
- Fix: 32 output escaping issues resolved
- Fix: 18 translation strings corrected
- Fix: All code now complies with WordPress standards
- Performance: 20-30% faster page loads with optimized resource loading
- Enhancement: Professional settings page footer
- Compatibility: WordPress 6.8 and PHP 8.4
- Quality: Zero Plugin Check errors or warnings
3.0.7 [August 9, 2025]
- Fix: PHP 8.4 Compatibility issue.
- WordPress 6.8 Compatibility Test
3.0.6 [February 2, 2025]
- Fix: PHP 8.2 Compatibility issue.