Glossary Tooltip

Automatically Highlight Terms & Show Tooltips

General Settings

The General Settings section controls how Glossary Tooltip automatically detects, highlights, and links glossary terms across your WordPress website.

These settings allow you to choose where glossary terms are displayed, how often they are highlighted, how matching works, and how the plugin balances accuracy, compatibility, and performance.

For most websites, the default settings provide the best experience. Advanced options are available if you need to customize the plugin for your specific theme, plugins, or content.

Posts to Highlight

Choose the post types where Glossary Tooltip should automatically scan content and highlight glossary terms.

You can enable highlighting for standard WordPress posts, pages, glossary terms, or any supported custom post types.

For most websites, enabling highlighting only on the content types where glossary terms are actually used provides the best performance.

Repeated Highlighting

By default, each glossary term is highlighted only once within a piece of content.

If you prefer, you can highlight a glossary term multiple times or every time it appears. You can also skip every second, third, or custom occurrence to create a balanced reading experience.

For long articles, highlighting only the first occurrence is usually recommended because it keeps the content clean and avoids distracting readers.

Glossary Permalink Slug

The Glossary Permalink Slug controls the URL structure used for individual glossary terms.

For example, using the slug glossary creates URLs like:

https://example.com/glossary/search-engine-optimization

If you change this setting after your website is live, remember to refresh your WordPress permalinks by visiting Settings → Permalinks and clicking Save Changes.

Glossary Taxonomy Slug

This option controls the URL used for glossary categories.

For example:

https://example.com/glossary-cat/seo

Changing this slug also requires refreshing your WordPress permalinks.

Highlight Only on Single Posts & Pages

Enable this option if you want Glossary Tooltip to work only on individual posts and pages.

When enabled, glossary terms won’t be highlighted on archive pages, category pages, tag pages, search results, or your homepage.

This setting is recommended for websites that want cleaner archive pages or improved performance.

Highlight Only Space-Separated Terms

This option ensures that glossary terms are matched only when they appear as complete words.

For example, the term SEO will match:

  • SEO
  • SEO Guide
  • Learn SEO

But it won’t match parts of larger words or identifiers where the letters are not intended to represent the glossary term.

This helps prevent incorrect highlighting.

Exclude Glossary Terms from Site Search

Enable this option if you don’t want individual glossary entries to appear in your website’s internal search results.

This setting only affects your site’s search feature and does not prevent glossary pages from being indexed by search engines.

Match Case-Sensitive Terms

By default, Glossary Tooltip ignores letter case when matching terms.

For example:

  • SEO
  • seo
  • Seo
  • sEO

will all match the same glossary term.

If you enable case-sensitive matching, only terms with the exact capitalization will be highlighted.

This option is useful for technical abbreviations or programming-related terminology.

Content Parsing

Content parsing determines how Glossary Tooltip scans your website content before adding glossary links.

These options improve compatibility with themes, page builders, and other plugins while helping prevent unwanted highlighting.

Skip Parsing When No Terms Exist

When enabled, the plugin quickly checks whether glossary terms exist before performing a full content scan.

This reduces unnecessary processing and can improve page performance, especially on websites with large amounts of content.

Ignore Headings

Enable this option to prevent glossary terms from being highlighted inside heading elements such as H1 through H6.

This is recommended because headings are important for readability, SEO, and page structure.

Ignore Links

Glossary Tooltip will ignore text that already appears inside existing hyperlinks.

This prevents nested links, preserves your original anchor text, and avoids HTML validation issues.

Keeping this option enabled is recommended for most websites.

Exclude Specific HTML Tags

You can exclude selected HTML elements from glossary parsing.

For example, you may choose to ignore:

  • <span>
  • <strong>
  • <blockquote>
  • <em>
  • <mark>

The plugin already ignores several HTML elements by default, including code blocks, scripts, styles, images, and other elements where glossary links should not be inserted.

Content Parsing Priority

The parsing priority determines when Glossary Tooltip processes your content relative to other WordPress plugins.

The default value works well for most websites.

If another plugin modifies your content after Glossary Tooltip runs, increasing the priority may resolve compatibility issues.

Only change this setting if recommended during troubleshooting.

Performance & Asset Loading

Glossary Tooltip includes several performance features designed to keep your website fast while automatically linking glossary terms.

Only Highlight on Main WordPress Query

When enabled, glossary terms are highlighted only in the primary content displayed on the page.

This prevents highlighting inside widgets, sliders, related posts, custom queries, and other secondary content.

Keeping this option enabled is recommended.

Enable Content Caching

Content caching stores processed content so the plugin doesn’t need to scan and rebuild glossary links every time a page loads.

This option is especially useful for large websites or websites with high traffic.

Load Scripts in Footer

Instead of loading JavaScript in the page header, Glossary Tooltip can load its scripts in the footer.

This helps reduce render-blocking resources and may improve page loading performance.

For most websites, keeping this option enabled is recommended.

Load CSS & JavaScript Inline

This option loads the plugin’s styles and scripts directly within the page instead of as separate files.

Depending on your website and caching setup, inline assets may reduce HTTP requests and improve loading speed.

If you’re using advanced optimization or caching plugins, test both methods to determine which works best for your website.

Recommended Settings

For the best balance of performance, usability, and compatibility, we recommend the following configuration:

  • Highlight glossary terms only where needed.
  • Highlight the first occurrence of each term.
  • Ignore headings and existing links.
  • Enable parsing optimization.
  • Enable the main query option.
  • Enable footer script loading.
  • Enable content caching on large websites.
  • Leave parsing priority at the default value unless troubleshooting requires otherwise.

Next Steps

Now that you’ve configured the General Settings, continue with the next guide to learn how to create and customize your glossary page.

Next: Glossary Index