Adding Footnotes in the WordPress block editor

One of the reasons why I put my footnotes plugin up for adoption is because the block editor now has basic footnotes built into it. I moved all of my footnotes over to this, disabled my plugin and haven’t looked back since.

So, let me explain how you do it.

First of all, if you have a post or page (I’ll just say “post” in future, but either work here), you’ll need to find a place for where you want the footnotes to appear – you’ll probably put this at the bottom.

Type in /footnotes to add the Footnotes block. It’s empty but there are various block settings in the sidebar that you can add.

Now, to add a footnote at any point, when typing, the floating toolbar has a down-arrow near to the right-hand side. Click this and one of the options is “Footnote”. You should see something like this…

Click on “Footnote”. When you do this it will add a link and then move you to your footnotes block where you can add the associated text. If you didn’t add a block first, one will be added immediately after the paragraph you were just writing. Again, it will look something like this…

You can now repeat this latter process for any footnotes, and they’ll all be added to the block.

One thing that is missing from this block solution is a method to change the link style – numerical footnotes is the only, rather than roman numerals or symbols, which other plugins will allow for. Never-the-less, if all you’re after is a simple footnoting system, this works just great.