Essence Table of Contents

Install it, and your long posts have a contents list above the first heading. There is no setup wizard, no welcome screen and nothing to configure first.

Every heading gets its own address, so a reader can link somebody straight to the part that answers their question.

Every other contents plugin loads a script. This one loads none, on any page, ever.

It helps accessibility too. A control the browser provides cannot trap the keyboard, cannot fall out of step with its own label, and cannot break when some other script on the page does.

Most contents plugins build a heading’s link out of the heading’s own words, and each one has its own rules for it. Change plugin and the links change too. Every #link anyone has ever shared, in an email, a forum answer, a search result, now points at a name that is not there any more. Nobody sees an error. The reader lands at the top of the page and scrolls, and you never hear about it.

So the move copies what your old plugin was doing, down to the way it numbered a repeated heading.

We read LuckyWP 2.1.14 and Easy Table of Contents 2.0.88 line by line to write this, and we run the whole move against real installations of both, in a browser, before every release.

Change “Laying the boards” to “Laying the first row” and most contents plugins quietly break the link somebody shared to that section. This one keeps it.

Each post remembers the anchors it has published, and matches an edited heading back to its own: by an id you set, then by its words, then by its place in the post. Reword a heading and the link still works. Move a section and it still works. We have not found another contents plugin that does this.

The typeface, the sizes and the colours come from your theme, because we ship the least CSS we can get away with. If the list looks bare on your theme, there is a light box, a dark box and five colour pickers. If you would rather do it all yourself, one setting prints no CSS at all.

Checked in a browser on Storefront, Astra, Kadence, GeneratePress and WordPress’s own default theme, in both directions of text, before every release.

One page, four groups, and a sentence under every field saying what it is for. Where the list goes, what it lists, how it looks, and what the links are called. A field that only matters sometimes appears only when it does.

A writer can also change one post without touching the settings: a panel in the editor turns the list off for that post, gives it its own title, moves it, or lists different levels.

Ask on the plugin’s support forum and we reply within one working day. Say which theme you use and link to the post; that helps more than anything. The forum opens when the plugin is approved.

Made by Essence Design, a brand and design agency in Birmingham that has run WordPress sites for its clients for years.