If you’re here, you’ve like wanted to add the registered symbol (®) or trademark symbol (™) to the title of your WordPress post, page, or product, only to find that it won’t display as a superscript like you want! Or perhaps you’ve been wanting to add some other symbol, text, or number as superscript or subscript to your WordPress title but it just never seems to display right.
Have no fear! We’re here to help.
The secret lies in the fact that you can actually add HTML elements to the title of any WordPress page, assuming that you are an Admin. So, let’s hop to it!
How to add superscript or subscript symbols to a WordPress title
- Make sure you are logged in as an administrator (It will strip out your HTML otherwise)
- Navigate to the page, post, or product that you’d like to work on from the backend
- Add the following code for superscript: <sup>®</sup> , and the following for sub: <sub>®</sub> (replace the ® with your symbol or text of choice)
- Click “Save Changes” to update
Nice and easy! The “<sup>” HTML element simply causes the text to display as a superscript, while the <sub> element causes subscript.
Working on this got me thinking… What other elements can you add to a WordPress title? Surely there must be more!
As it turns out, I believe that ALL inline HTML elements will work, though most wouldn’t be particularly useful. So taking this one step further, here are some more helpful HTML elements you can add to your WordPress titles.
List of useful (more or less) HTML elements you can add to your WordPress titles
- <a>
Yes, you can add links directly to your titles! Might be a fringe use case? - <b> / <strong>
Yes, you can make part of your title bold! Of course, this may be overridden by your other style settings anyway. Note that fans of the Semantic Web should generally use <strong> over <bold>. - <br>
You can actually introduce a line break into your title! Again, not sure why you’d want to, but you can! - <button>
You can use this HTML5 element to add a clickable button right in your title! Not sure I’d recommend it though. - <em>
This one could actually be quite useful! If you need to emphasize part of your title (which generally includes making it italicized), this element is perfect. - <img>
You can add images to your titles. But again… Why would you want to? - <input>
No. Just, no. - <q>
Useful for adding quotes in to your title. Might be more semantic than just manually adding the quotes. - <script>
You actually can add scripts directly to a post title. Generally, I think this is a terrible idea but there could be some fringe use for it. - <span>
You could use a span to manually select styling for a portion of text within the title. For instance, you could do something like: <span style="color:green;">Green</span> - <sub> and <sup>
We’ve already gone over these! You can make text subscript or superscript if you like. - <marquee>
If you hate your visitors and want to show them just how deep that hate runs, use this element.
There are more elements that would work, but I didn’t include them because you really just shouldn’t use them. For example, I was pleased to discover that the <blink> element did not work in Chrome. There are many other terrible elements that I hope are never spoken of again that may or may not work in WordPress titles.
But there you have it! Hopefully now you’ve got a little bit more control over WordPress titles, as well as some ideas of how to use them.
16 Comments on “How to Add Superscript®, Subscript©, and More™ to WordPress Titles”
Quick question on superscript register marks ®… how do you control their size so that they don’t look so awful, other than making them an image? My experience has been that if you just superscript the font chosen, the register mark is superscripted, but very large and obnoxious. Does this vary from font-to-font?
Thanks!
It probably varies from font to font. It’s possible you could try adding a span or something in there and specifying a different font size, though I haven’t tested that. It’s certainly not what is intended in the title of a post.
Thank you so much, Brian! I finally got the superscript TM to work – after scouring the plugin possibilities on WP and coming up empty.
Glad I could help!
Hello, do you know How to add superscript or subscript symbols to a WordPress MENU? Where could I found scripts showing MENU in WordPress? Thanks for your answer.
Hello, do you know How to add superscript or subscript symbols to a WordPress MENU? Where could I found scripts showing MENU in WordPress? Thanks for your answer.
Just because it works doesn’t mean you should do it.
Just because it works doesn’t mean you should do it.
Hah, fair point. For the most part I would say that you shouldn’t do any of this, but I’ve run into situations where there was really no way around it. And when you need to know, you need to know!
Thank you. Been searching for this
Thank you!! This totally worked.
Hi, when I use in menus it does not work with the font I am using (Raleway). Is there another way to do it?
it is really helpful. thanks for sharing such a great information. it helped me adding in mathematics questions.
I went to WP’s special characters to get superscripts.
there was 1, 2 and 3. Right. No 4 or 5? I knew there
had to be a solution. Your post supplied it just right. Thanks!
Superb, thanks 🙂
Wow. I didn’t know that we can add html tag like to WordPress title field. Good read. Thanks, Brian.