How To Remove Your WordPress Footer
Why would you want to remove your WordPress footer? Because you don’t want to buy the Pro version of your theme, and you want that more polished look to your site… without having to pay for it.
Like I did.
Usually, to get rid of that “Powered by” tag in your footer area, you have to spend $20 or $40 to get the option appearing in your theme settings, but you may well have several sites using several themes, and who knows, you may well change-up those themes for something new in the future.
So that could get pricey and wasteful, and all to remove that annoying little line.
Some folks it doesn’t bother, and it’s purely a cosmetic decision, because stripping that out of your site isn’t going to be the magic talisman that suddenly results in a flood of traffic.
But if it bothers you, and you want to your site to look a little less the amateur dabbler, then here’s a simple solution.
Remover Footer Credit
As the heading suggests, that’s the solution. As in, the name of the WordPress plugin to install. And here’s where to get it.
Or “Add New” from your Plugins menu, type the name in, and WordPress will find it for you. Then install and activate it.
Now don’t get your panties in a bunch about adding too many plugins and slowing your site down. That’s a general rule, and a good rule for newbs and the uninitiated to follow, but most well-developed plugins won’t add significant loading time to your site. Like, you might add another microsecond, but Google won’t penalise you for that…
So don’t panic. Especially with a plugin as little and light as this is.
And as you can see if you go to the product page, it’s regularly updated to remain current and compatible with the latest releases of WordPress, so it’s not a vintage piece of code that you take your chances with. I’ve used it for years with no issues, and so have a multitude of others: more than 50,000 installations at time of writing. The weight of positive reviews is with the plugin too, if you read the comments.
Now, you could do this by editing your theme, changing the relevant php file… but we’re not all coders, and if not, you’re just likely to screw up the changes and bring your whole site down. And then not know how to fix it. Cue a call to your hosting support desk.
So the plugin route is the safe and easy way to do it.
Even if you think you’re a coder because you recorded a Macro in Microsoft Excel one time.
Trust me, still do it this way: you won’t know what you’re looking at with PHP, the stuff your theme’s made of.
So How Do You Use It?
Once installed, you’ll find ‘Remove Footer Credit’ hiding under your Tools menu on the left hand side: Tools -> Remove Footer Credit.
From there, there’s only one screen to deal with. See what I mean about this being light.
Here’s my settings, for this site. I could go off and take a fresh example from one of my test sites… but that’d be a little too much like work, and I’m logged on here anyway.
I’ve gotten a little flasher than you need to, as I wanted to replace the entire “Powered by” thing with a link to my site host. You don’t need to get so imaginative, you can just put whatever text you’d prefer displayed in the bottom box.
As for the top box, I wanted to be thorough with getting rid of the whole reference to Glades (the name of this theme), so I used “View page source” to find the HTML on my pages to remove.
You do that by right clicking on any page of your site:
That’ll open a frightening page of code that looks like it’s written in an alien language, but fret not, because you’re only interested in one line of it, and it’s easy to find by doing a search on the page for “Powered By” (or whatever text it is you’re looking to replace).
I’m assuming you know how to bring up “Find” to do a page search, but if not, ask in Comments.
When you find it, that’s the whole line you need to copy into the first box above, and it should look pretty similar to what you see in my example.
In the bottom box, you don’t need to get as fancy as I got, you can just write your site name or whatever. Try “I just removed the footer credit” or even the old stand by “Hello World” to test it at first.
Then click the “Save” button at the bottom of the screen. Important to remember that or nothing’s going to happen.
Then go to your site, refresh your page, and see what you got.
If you got nothing, or not what you expected, drop a line in Comments.
And there you have it: you’ve saved yourself a few bucks and got a slicker looking site that isn’t obviously the free theme option.
Like this site is using.
Hey, this is money making, and that includes saving it 😉
More Coding & CSS Help
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