Glossary Tooltip

Automatically Highlight Terms & Show Tooltips

Troubleshooting

This guide covers the most common issues you may encounter while using Glossary Tooltip and provides recommended solutions.

Most problems can be resolved by reviewing your plugin settings, clearing your website cache, or checking for conflicts with themes or other plugins.

If you’re still experiencing issues after following this guide, please contact our support team.

Glossary Terms Are Not Highlighted

If glossary terms are not appearing within your content, check the following:

  • Ensure glossary highlighting is enabled.
  • Verify that the current post type is selected under Posts to Highlight.
  • Confirm that glossary terms have been published.
  • Make sure the glossary term exists exactly as it appears in your content.
  • Clear your website, plugin, and browser cache.

If you’ve recently changed the glossary permalink or settings, save your settings again and refresh your WordPress permalinks.

Some Terms Are Not Being Highlighted

Several settings can intentionally prevent highlighting.

Check whether:

  • The term appears inside a heading.
  • The term is already inside another link.
  • The term is inside an excluded HTML element.
  • Case-sensitive matching is enabled.
  • Space-separated matching prevents partial matches.

These settings help prevent incorrect or unwanted glossary links.

Glossary Tooltips Are Not Displayed

If glossary links appear but tooltips do not:

  • Make sure tooltips are enabled.
  • Verify that JavaScript is loading correctly.
  • Clear all website caches.
  • Disable JavaScript optimization temporarily to test for conflicts.
  • Check whether another plugin is blocking JavaScript execution.

Open your browser’s Developer Console to see if any JavaScript errors are present.

Glossary Links Look Incorrect

If glossary links don’t match your website design:

  • Review the Glossary Link Color settings.
  • Check the underline options.
  • Clear cached CSS files.
  • Verify that your theme isn’t overriding plugin styles.

If necessary, you can customize the appearance using your own CSS.

Glossary Page Is Empty

If the glossary page displays no entries:

  • Confirm that a Glossary Index page has been selected.
  • Ensure glossary terms are published.
  • Check whether glossary terms are assigned the correct status.
  • Verify that your theme is displaying WordPress content correctly.

If you’re using the shortcode, make sure it has been added correctly.

Permalink Issues

If glossary term pages return a 404 Not Found error:

  1. Go to Settings → Permalinks.
  2. Click Save Changes without changing anything.
  3. Clear your website cache.

This refreshes WordPress rewrite rules and usually resolves permalink issues.

Performance Feels Slow

If your website becomes slower after enabling Glossary Tooltip:

  • Enable Content Caching.
  • Enable Main Query Only.
  • Reduce the number of highlighted post types.
  • Clear all caches.
  • Disable conflicting plugins temporarily for testing.

Most performance issues are caused by caching or third-party plugin conflicts rather than the plugin itself.

Theme Compatibility Issues

Glossary Tooltip is built using standard WordPress APIs and works with most modern themes.

If highlighting or tooltips behave unexpectedly:

  • Switch temporarily to a default WordPress theme.
  • Test whether the issue still exists.
  • Disable custom content filters.
  • Check whether your theme modifies post content before it is displayed.

This helps identify whether the problem is theme-related.

Plugin Conflicts

Occasionally another plugin may modify the same content before or after Glossary Tooltip.

To identify conflicts:

  1. Deactivate all plugins except Glossary Tooltip.
  2. Test whether the issue remains.
  3. Reactivate plugins one at a time.
  4. Identify which plugin causes the problem.

Once identified, you can often resolve the issue by adjusting plugin settings or content parsing priority.

Browser Cache

Sometimes your browser may continue displaying older versions of your pages.

Try the following:

  • Perform a hard refresh.
  • Clear your browser cache.
  • Open the page in a private/incognito window.
  • Test using a different browser.

Still Need Help?

If you’ve tried the solutions above and the problem persists, we’re here to help.

Before contacting support, please include:

  • WordPress version
  • PHP version
  • Glossary Tooltip version
  • Theme name
  • Active plugins
  • Steps to reproduce the issue
  • Screenshots (if applicable)
  • Browser name and version

Providing this information helps us investigate and resolve your issue more quickly.

Best Practices

To keep Glossary Tooltip running smoothly:

  • Keep WordPress updated.
  • Use the latest version of Glossary Tooltip.
  • Keep your theme and plugins up to date.
  • Clear caches after changing plugin settings.
  • Refresh permalinks after changing glossary slugs.
  • Test new plugins for compatibility before using them on a live website.

Following these recommendations helps ensure the best performance and compatibility.

Next Steps

You’ve now completed the core documentation for Glossary Tooltip.

For information about changes in each release, bug fixes, and new features, continue to the final documentation page.

Next: Changelog