How to Remove the Footer Credit in WordPress Themes

There may be times you wish to remove the footer credit from WordPress, either to replace it with your own footer credits or to remove it entirely for design or aesthetic reasons. In WordPress, you can change the footer credit rather easily, but if you’ve never done it before, knowing where to go to do it can be a bit tricky.

I’m going to show you two ways to remove the footer credit, first with a plugin called Remove Footer Credit, then manually, by editing a theme file.

How to Remove the Foot Credit in WordPress

Unfortunately, not all themes will let you remove the footer credit from the WordPress customize dashboard. Most premium themes have this feature, but most free versions do not.

One of the easiest ways to remove a credit from a WordPress theme in the footer is by using the Remove Footer Credit plugin.

  1. Install the Remove Footer Credit Plugin
  2. Find Footer’s Code in the Theme
  3. Paste the Code in the Remove Footer Credit Plugin
  4. Add Text and Save

It’s literally that quick and easy to remove the footer credit from a WordPress theme.

Let me break down the steps a bit even further…

Step 1: Install Remove Footer Credit Plugin

Log in to your WordPress admin panel.

In the left column navigation mouse over the “Plugins” link and click the “Add New” link.

mouse over the "Plugins" link and click the "Add New" link

In the “Search plugins…” box, enter “Remove Footer Credit.”

search for the WordPress Remove Footer Credit plugin

Once you have located the plugin, click the “Install Now” button.

click to install the WordPress Remove Footer Credit plugin

When the plugin has been installed, click the “Activate” button.

click to activate the WordPress Remove Footer Credit plugin

Step 2: Find the Footer’s Code in the WordPress Theme

In the left column navigation, mouse over the “Tools” link and click the “Remove Footer Credit” link.

click the "Remove Footer Credit" link

You use the plugin by entering the text or HTML that you would like to find, and the text or HTML that you would like to replace it with.

You can copy and paste the text that you want to remove, but it’s better to copy the underlying HTML. That way, you’re sure that you’re only removing the footer credit, and you won’t inadvertently remove the same text if you use it elsewhere.

Like in a post about removing the footer credit. 😉

So to get to the HTML, we’re going to view the page source for any page or post on your site.

view page source

Search for div class=”site-info” (or just scroll down near the bottom) and copy everything between:

and


copy the code between the highlighted lines

Step 3: Paste the Code into Remove Footer Credit

Go back to Tools > Remove Footer Credit and paste the code you copied into the “Step 1: Enter text/HTML to remove (one per line)” field.

paste code copied from source

Step 4: Add Your Own Text and Save

In the “Step 2: Enter your own footer credit (one per line)” field, enter your new footer credit (or leave it blank to remove the line altogether). In this example, I am simply putting “My blog.”

enter replacement text

Click the “Save” button.

Click the "Save" button

That should remove the footer credit from your WordPress site and replace it with your text or code.

replacement text

Alternate Method: Remove the Credit Line by Editing the footer.php File for Your Theme

Using a plugin is a fast and easy way to replace the footer credit on every page of your site. But it comes at the cost of the resources needed to scan every page that loads looking for the code and replacing it on the fly.

You can avoid that by editing the footer.php file for your theme to make the change. The process is a bit more involved, but it will save the resources used on every page load by plugins such as Remove Footer Credit.

Before We Proceed…

Never edit WordPress core or theme files without creating a child theme first.

Working in the child theme has a couple of advantages. First, if you break something, you can revert to the parent theme until you figure out what went wrong.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, when you make changes to a child theme, they will not be overwritten or erased when you update either your theme or WordPress itself.

Once you have created a child theme, mouse over the “Appearance” link and click the “Theme Editor” link.

click the "Theme Editor" link

Click the “Activate” button for your child theme.

lick the "Activate" button for your child theme

Open up your FTP program or cPanel file editor and copy the footer.php file from your parent theme to your child theme.

In most FTP programs, you won’t be able to copy and paste files, in which case you’ll download footer.php from the parent theme and then upload it to the child theme.

So in my example here, I FTP’ed to:

/wp-content/themes/twentynineteen

downloaded footer.php, and then uploaded it to:

/wp-content/themes/twentynineteen-child

Now in your WordPress admin panel, mouse over the “Appearance” link and click the “Theme Editor” link.

click the "Theme Editor" link

Choose your child theme from the drop-down and click the “Select” button.

choose your child theme

Now, as we did when using the plugin, look for:

in the footer.php file. I’m using a child of the Twenty Nineteen theme, so we’re going to replace:



	,


	

with:

“My blog.”

cut footer credit code
replace footer credit code with text

Click the “Update File” button, and the footer credit link will be changed.

click the "Update File" button
new footer

Going Further

I used text here to simplify the demonstration, but you can replace the default footer credit with more than just text. The fact that you can use PHP in the footer makes some cool things possible. Like automatically showing the current year if you use a copyright notice.

To do that you can use something like:


$thisyear = date("Y");
print (" My blog ©$thisyear by me. ");
?>
a dynamic copyright date

Am I allowed to remove the footer credit from WordPress?

Yes.

WordPress is licensed under GPL (General Public License). One of the freedoms allowed by GPL is the “freedom to change the software to suit your needs.”

So don’t worry, you aren’t going to land in hot water when you remove the footer credit from WordPress.

Have you used other methods to change or remove the footer credits in your theme? Do you use a child theme when you make changes? Let me know in the comments.

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