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How to Fix Skype Overwriting Phone Numbers in WordPress Themes

If you have Skype on your computer you may have noticed that sometimes Skype highlights phone numbers automatically when you visit a website. From a WordPress developers point of view this can be very frustrating. Not only can it make your site look bad, but it can mess up the layout as well. In fact, just recently we had a client whose page kept breaking because Skype was highlighting his phone number. Fixing this problem is not very hard. All you have to do is add some code to the head of your HTML document and it will prevent Skype from highlighting numbers in your theme no matter what browser it is being displayed on. This is the code you should paste:


<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" content="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE" />

Make sure it is between the <head> and </head> tags.

For those of you who simply want to turn on the plugin, then download our plugin Prevent Skype Overwriting.

We hope that this help you fix the Skype overwriting phone numbers in WordPress themes. If you have any questions or feedback, then please leave a comment below.

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Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

7 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Natedaug

    Thanks. I’m not using wordpress, but it was messing with my Angular bindings on my site.

  2. Alpesh

    Thanks ..nice

  3. Tony

    Is there no way to simply modify the Skype Click To Call highlight colour using CSS?

    I would quite like to keep the Skype functionality on my website / or on a user’s computer who have enabled Skype Click To Call… however, since my site have a gre background, the Skype Click To Call color (blue) is really horrid !!

    Anyone know how to modify the click to call highlight color, using the website CSS ??

    I understood from a StackOverflow article that Skype uses a long and randomized string on each highlighted click to call element – making it very difficult to target the CSS.

    If anyone can shed light on this – that would be good.

    Oh – and two fingers up to Microsoft (Skype) for not thinking of developers :-)

  4. Michelle Abrahmz

    Thanks so much! I added it ot my all in one seo plug in and it fixed it. I don’t use IE, but checked and it worked there as well.

  5. Karen Leslie

    Ah it seems like I have a plugin that is overriding it so I need to add it somewhere else as well…

    Cheers,
    Karen

  6. Karen Leslie

    Has anyone else found that this doesn’t seem to work in IE8?
    I’ve tried the plugin too with the same results – it works sometimes like on the Home page of a wordpress website but not on all the pages….

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