Are you looking to display code snippets in WordPress, then you will find the syntax highlighter very helpful in designing your website.
Developing a website that has clean, clear, and optimized content requires you to understand how syntax highlighting works. Syntax highlighting is the process of using colors in order to clearly differentiate the different parts of code used. This has numerous positive effects on your website. It helps you to increase its appeal as well as its overall quality.
In this article, we are going to provide you with a collection of the 5 best and free WordPress Syntax Highlighting plugins to help developers display code snippets in a professional way.
1. HTML Editor Syntax Highlighter
A feature-rich syntax highlighting plugin for the classic text editor, Gutenberg code editor, and theme & plugin editors. Based on the known CodeMirror.js library.
2. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved
A WordPress plugin that allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without losing its formatting or making any manual changes.
3. Enlighter – Customizable Syntax Highlighter
A free, easy-to-use, syntax highlighting tool for WordPress. Highlighting is powered by the EnlighterJS javascript library to provide a beautiful code-appearance.
Using it can be as simple as adding a new Enlighter Sourcecode block (Gutenberg) and insert the code which you want to highlight: Enlighter takes care of the rest!
An easy-to-use Theme-Customizer is included to modify the build-in themes without any CSS knowledge! It also supports the automatic creation of tab-panes to display code-groups together (useful for multi-language examples – e.g. html+css+js)
More Features:
- Full Gutenberg Editor Integration
- Full Classic Editor Integration (TinyMCE)
- Support for all common used languages
- Powerful generic highlighting engine for unknown languages
- Theme Customizer
- Inline Syntax Highlighting
- Advanced configuration options are available within the options page.
- Supports code-groups (displays multiple code-blocks within a tab-pane)
- Extensible language and theme engines – add your own one.
- Simple CSS based themes
- Integrated CSS file caching (suitable for high traffic sites)
- Full GDPR compliant – no external resources are required, no data will be aggregated
4. Highlighting Code Block
The plugin allows you to add a syntax-highlighted code block with just a click. It supports both Block Editor and Classic Editor.
5. Code Syntax Block
The extends the WordPress Gutenberg block editor by adding syntax highlighting support to the core code block using the Prism syntax highlighter.
The Prism syntax highlighter runs JavaScript loaded on the front-end to parse code blocks and apply syntax markup. A CSS file specifies the color and style to apply to that markup.
Conclusion:
Why is this post the best syntax highlighting plugins on WordPress? Because the result of these plugins is not only easy to set up, but they also look great. You just need to install them then publish your code snippets as plain text and that’s it. I’m sure you’ll love what they can do to your code!
Given a large number of syntax highlighting plugins, it was not possible to find out all of them. Moreover there are also premium plugins that are paid to use and need additional costs. It is difficult to know if the best one among them is which one. So the decision will ultimately depend on what type of syntax highlighting you need, as well as what other features are important to you. Hopefully, however, we’ve helped you spark the debate that will help you decide for yourself.
