You’re building a brand on your website, and the “proudly powered by WordPress” footer link is cramping your style. How do you remove the powered by WordPress footer? Is it legal to remove that footer?

In this article, we are going to answer all of those questions and show you different ways to remove the powered by WordPress footer link.

What makes this footer link worse is when you use a theme, and that theme decides to add yet another footer. Now your footer is saying what theme you’re using too. So now your footer is crediting both WordPress and whatever company created your theme.

We solve that issue also!

If you haven’t created your WordPress site yet consider checking out this article about how to start a WordPress blog!

Is It Legal To Remove WordPress Footer Links?

This is an important question to ask before you remove the branding from something powered by WordPress.

The answer is, yes, it’s legal to remove this footer!

WordPress is under a GPL (General Public License), which is typical for a lot of free software. You’re able to alter and even redistribute WordPress without any worries at all.

When it comes to the themes for WordPress, you’ll want to make sure they’re released under the GPL license too. While about 90% of WordPress themes release under this license, some don’t. So, make sure to check that.

As long as both are under the GPL license, this means you can remove their credit from your footer legally.

Alright, enough about the legalities of removing the footer. Let’s remove this thing!

How to Remove Proudly Powered by WordPress From the Footer

There are several ways to remove the powered by WordPress footer. Many themes allow you to remove and alter the footer. If you’re on the business plan for WordPress, you’ll also unlock access to the ability to remove this footer from any WP theme.

If the first way doesn’t work for you, don’t worry, the second or third methods work like a charm.

1. Customize the Theme Settings

Any theme provider worth their salt includes some way for you to alter the footer and specifically the footer credit. It’s more natural and straight forward to do this via the Theme Settings page rather than having to code it.

First, you’ll want to go to the WordPress theme customizer, which is under Appearance > Customize.

Once you’re there, it can be under an array of different options. Look for Site Identity, Footer, Footer Bottom, or even possibly Copyright Area.

If it’s under “Site Identity,” it should look like this at the very bottom:

On the other hand, if it’s under one of the others like “Footer Bottom,” you’ll have access to more customizations. These can be simple customizations like what devices the footer is visible on. It can also be a custom footer that allows you to remove the powered by WordPress one and replace it with your branded footer.

These have some pretty impressive functionality at times, so don’t be afraid to play around with it a little.

Here’s an example from a “Footer Bottom” tab. As you can see, I replaced the Copyright text with my own and can customize more features.

Keep in mind, the option in your specific theme could be someplace else, so take some time to look around your theme and get to know it before resorting to the next step. I suggest this as the other two options are more complex than this one.

2. Remove Powered by WordPress with PHP

Don’t let this method intimidate you. It’s totally in your wheelhouse, and you have nothing to worry about.

Coding can be foreign to many and even tricky to those who are familiar with it, but for this, it’s not too bad.

Our goal is to get to our footer.php file so we can change that pesky powered by the footer. We do this by first going to our WP admin dashboard.

You can get here by typing in your WordPress URL then ‘/wp-admin’ before hitting enter.

For example, for me, this looks like ‘wp-testsite.com/wp-admin.’

You may have to log in, but once that’s done, you’re in your command center.

From here, you’ll go to Appearance then Theme Editor.

Keep in mind, our goal is to find and alter only the footer.php file, so make sure you don’t alter anything else. If you do, it could break something and experience the WordPress white screen of death.

On the right side of the screen, you should see your site’s Theme Files just under this heading are where you can select the files you can alter.

Find footer.php and click on it.

Find the “powered by WordPress” section. You can do this by scrolling down until you see it or search it using browser search.

Do this with Command + F on Mac or CTRL + F on PC. Then start typing “WordPress,” and it should show you all the uses of the word.

We’re looking for a block of code that looks like this.

Once you’ve found this block of code, you can remove it. Just make sure that you’re removing everything from <p class=”powered-by-wordpress”> down to </p><!– .powered-by-wordpress –> and nothing else.

Then, press the button at the bottom that says “Update File.”

After this, the only thing left to do is go to your website and see for yourself. The “powered by WordPress” portion of your footer should be gone.

3. Change Powered by WordPress with CSS (Not Recommended)

Though this is an option, we recommend avoiding this solution at all costs.

Using this method will almost certainly kill your WordPress website or blog’s SEO. 

And of you’ve done this in the past, I’d suggest using one of the other two methods we’ve covered above to fix it.

This is what the CSS method would look like:

#site-info {display:none}

Simple, right? Yes, however, it’s got repercussions that you don’t want to mess with.

This was a tactic used by people who wanted to get their sites to rank higher in Google search results, so they’d pack this “site-info” section with links. As a result, Google would rank their sites higher. However, Google eventually caught on and now punishes this form of behavior if it sees this.

If you do this, there’s a good chance your sites’ SEO will suffer.

Wrapping Up

And there you have it! You now know how to remove the “powered by WordPress” section from your WordPress’ footer section.

It’s always a good idea to use your theme to change the powered by WordPress footer as a first resort. If your theme doesn’t support it, then it’s time to dig into the PHP code. Remember, try to avoid using CSS to alter your website at all costs.

If you’re the type of person that doesn’t want a footer at all, consider checking out this tutorial about how to add infinite scroll to WordPress. And if you’re looking for the right theme for you to check out this article about 10 beautiful WordPress Divi theme examples.

Have you ever removed the “powered by WordPress” section from your site’s footer section? If so, which method did you use? We’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!

The post How to Remove the “Proudly Powered by WordPress” Footer Link appeared first on WPHacks.

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