Introduction
WordPress is a great content management system with a lot of different customization options and a simple, user friendly interface, but there’s one element that many users find harder to edit than they might expect. That would be the information in the footer of your pages, which can be surprisingly difficult to edit. If you want to take full control of every aspect of your WordPress site and how each element of each page looks, then you’re going to want to know how to edit wordpress footer elements.
Below, we’ll walk you through the process one step at a time. Hopefully, our guide will allow you to edit the footer of your wordpress pages with ease, customizing every aspect of your site to your heart’s content.
How to change the footer in WordPress
When you first install WordPress core, the default theme will have a bit of information visible in the footer, usually some default copyright information and some branding from the designers of the theme. You’ll probably want to edit that information out, though, either to put your own information in the space or simply to clear up the look of your WordPress site and make everything look a bit cleaner and neater.
There are a few different ways to change WordPress footer information, and we’re going to walk you through three of the simplest methods that most users should be able to get to grips with relatively easily. Some of these are more complex than others, and require a little coding, but we’ll walk you through that one step at a time.
Change WordPress footer content through Theme Customizer
One of the easiest ways to change the content of a WordPress website footer is to use the WordPress Theme Customizer for your current WordPress theme. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard in order to use this method.
Go to “Appearance” -> “Customize” and select “Customize.” This will open the Customizer for your currently active and installed WordPress theme, allowing you to edit a range of aspects of the theme. Somewhere in the Customizer, you should be able to find a section focused on Footer Settings. You should be able to use this to edit both the content and appearance of your footer, and you don’t need any coding knowledge to do so!
Editing WordPress footer code
The third option we’re going to look at is editing the code for your WordPress page’s footer directly. That means going into the files of your WordPress site directly and making changes to the footer.php file in order to change what gets displayed at the end.
In order to do this, you’re going to need to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard to access the files. Using the menu at the left hand side of the dashboard, go to “Appearance” -> “Editor”, and select “Editor”. This will bring up a list of theme files down the right hand side of the screen what you’re looking for is the one named Theme Footer, or footer.php. Open that, and you’re ready to start editing it.
You’ll be able to find the text displayed in your page footer somewhere in that file. Simply edit that text in order to change the text displayed at the bottom of each page. Just be careful not to delete any elements of code in the process!
WordPress Footer CSS
If you just want to get rid of the “Proudly Powered by WordPress” text at the bottom of your pages, then the easy option is to hide the footer content on your website pages. In order to do this, you’ll need to add a little custom CSS to your WordPress theme.
Start by logging into your WordPress admin dashboard, and go to “Appearance” -> “Customize”. Select “Customize”, and you’ll be taken to the WordPress Theme Customizer for whatever your currently active and installed theme might be.
Somewhere in the Customizer, potentially located as a subsection within “General Settings”, you should find a section focused on “Additional CSS”. Fill in the blank field here with text reading “site-info {display:none}”, and hit the “Publish” button. This should neatly hide all footer text on your web pages.
This is the easiest way to simply hide the text on the footers of your website, but if you want to customize your footer text to read something else, one of the other options listed above is probably a better bet for most purposes, unless you’re relatively confident with coding.
Conclusion
There are other ways to edit WordPress footer text and copyright information, but the three above are relatively simple and user friendly options for most purposes. Some of these are easy options for those who have little or no knowledge of coding for WordPress, while others require a bit more technical knowledge and are better suited to more experienced web developers. All of them produce similar results, however, so there’s a method of editing WordPress footer text that should fit your levels of expertise, whatever that may be.
Some themes may include easier options for allowing users to change WordPress footer copyright text, but the options listed above should work equally well on any of the many different WordPress themes available. WordPress might not offer this functionality in any easy to access way, but with our guide above you should be able to push the customizability of your WordPress site beyond the default flexibility afforded by the normal WordPress user interface.