Glossary Tooltip

Automatically Highlight Terms & Show Tooltips

Performance & Optimization

Glossary Tooltip is designed to automatically link glossary terms while maintaining excellent website performance.

The plugin includes several optimization features that reduce unnecessary processing, improve compatibility, and help your website load quickly—even when working with hundreds or thousands of glossary terms.

For most websites, the default settings provide the best balance between speed and functionality.

Content Processing

Every time a page loads, Glossary Tooltip scans your content and replaces matching terms with glossary links.

The plugin is optimized to perform this process efficiently, but several settings allow you to further reduce processing when needed.

Highlight Only the Main Query

Enable Main Query Only to process only the primary page content generated by WordPress.

When enabled, Glossary Tooltip ignores secondary queries such as:

  • Recent Posts widgets
  • Related Posts
  • Sliders
  • Custom loops
  • Sidebar content

This reduces unnecessary processing and improves compatibility with themes and plugins.

Recommended: Enabled

Content Caching

Content caching stores processed content after glossary links have been generated.

Instead of scanning the content every time a visitor loads a page, the plugin can reuse the cached version.

Benefits include:

  • Faster page generation
  • Lower server load
  • Improved scalability
  • Better performance on high-traffic websites

Content caching is especially recommended for websites with hundreds of glossary terms.

Skip Unnecessary Processing

The plugin intelligently skips processing whenever glossary highlighting isn’t required.

For example, it avoids unnecessary work when:

  • No glossary terms exist
  • Highlighting is disabled for the current post type
  • The current page shouldn’t be parsed

This helps minimize CPU usage and improves response times.

JavaScript & CSS Loading

Glossary Tooltip loads only the assets required for its features.

This helps reduce unnecessary requests and keeps your pages lightweight.

Load Scripts in Footer

Instead of loading JavaScript in the page header, scripts can be loaded just before the closing </body> tag.

Benefits include:

  • Reduced render-blocking resources
  • Faster perceived page speed
  • Better Core Web Vitals

Recommended: Enabled

Inline Assets

You can choose to load the plugin’s CSS and JavaScript inline.

Depending on your caching strategy, inline assets may reduce HTTP requests.

However, websites using advanced optimization plugins or CDNs may perform better with external files.

Test both options to determine which works best for your website.

Compatibility

Glossary Tooltip is built to work alongside modern WordPress themes and plugins.

If another plugin modifies post content before or after Glossary Tooltip runs, you may need to adjust the parsing priority.

In most cases, the default priority works perfectly and should not be changed.

Only modify this setting when troubleshooting compatibility issues.

Large Websites

If your website contains hundreds or thousands of glossary entries, consider the following recommendations.

  • Enable Content Caching.
  • Process only the main query.
  • Highlight only the required post types.
  • Ignore headings and existing links.
  • Keep parsing priority at the default value.
  • Use a reliable page caching plugin.

These settings help maintain excellent performance as your glossary grows.

Recommended Hosting Environment

Glossary Tooltip works with all standard WordPress hosting providers.

For the best experience, we recommend:

  • PHP 8.1 or newer
  • Latest version of WordPress
  • Object caching (optional)
  • Page caching plugin
  • HTTP/2 or HTTP/3
  • SSL (HTTPS)

Modern hosting significantly improves the performance of all WordPress plugins, including Glossary Tooltip.

Troubleshooting Performance Issues

If you notice slower page loading after enabling Glossary Tooltip:

  1. Enable Content Caching.
  2. Enable Main Query Only.
  3. Reduce the number of highlighted post types.
  4. Disable unnecessary plugins to identify conflicts.
  5. Clear your website cache.
  6. Regenerate any server or CDN caches.
  7. Test with the default parsing priority.

Most performance issues are caused by third-party plugin conflicts rather than Glossary Tooltip itself.

Best Practices

For optimal performance, we recommend:

  • Enable Content Caching.
  • Enable Main Query Only.
  • Load scripts in the footer.
  • Highlight only the content types that need glossary links.
  • Keep parsing priority at its default value.
  • Use a quality caching plugin.
  • Keep WordPress, PHP, and Glossary Tooltip up to date.

Following these recommendations ensures the best balance between performance, compatibility, and functionality.

Next Steps

If you encounter unexpected behavior or plugin conflicts, continue to the next guide for common solutions and troubleshooting tips.

Next: Troubleshooting