How to Remove Footer Credits from Your WordPress Blog – 4 Easy Methods

By Tech, Wordpress 0 Comments

How to Remove the Footer Credits from your WordPress blog?

Or

How to Remove Copyright Footer text from WordPress Theme

If you are searching this on Google, that means, you either have no or less knowledge in coding. Well, you’re not alone. Most of the upcoming bloggers come across the same question. There is this text “Proudly powered by WordPress” or “Theme By Theme Owner” with hyperlink to the theme developer. Even I’ve been asked by few of my contacts about removing footer credits from their blog. In this article, I am going to explain step-by-step methods of Remove Footer Credits from Your WordPress Blog.

The wordpress themes with default installations and free wordpress themes will have “proudly powered by WordPress” or “Theme by Theme Owner” footer credits by defaults. Even some of the paid themes will have the footer credits by default but whether it’s a free theme or a paid theme it doesn’t look good if you want to build a professional website or blog. Before knowing how to remove footer credits from WordPress blog, let’s understand how and why we see those credits in the footer.

What has been Covered in this Article

  1. Why does the WordPress Themes have Footer Credits?
  2. Is it Legal to Remove Footer Credits?
  3. Importance of Having Backup
  4. Step by Step Methods to Remove Footer Credits from your WordPress Blog
  5. Conclusion 

Note: Clicking on the Above links will directly take you to the mentioned step by step method.

Why does the WordPress Themes have Footer Credits?

For those who don’t know what exactly is the footer credits, below is the screenshot of the typical footer section with credits.

So, Why do we see this? Most of the wordpress themes we use are free. Developed either by an independent developers or WordPress.org. Since you want to use their free theme, anyone who spent their time to build such beautiful themes will expect something in return. In this situation, a footer credits will help the developer to get some identity along with the backlink to their website.

Since we are using their hard-coded theme, it’s ok to give some credits to the developer.. right? Yes, we can offer our gratitude by keeping the footer credits but it looks unprofessional to our readers. So, it’s better to offer our gratitude by some other ways. Now, you might have started thinking whether it’s legal to remove footer credits? Let’s talk about that too..

Am I Allowed to Remove / Is it Legal to remove “Powered by WordPress” footer Credits?

Most of the themes we use are free since WordPress, as an entity, is free and licensed under the GPL (General Public License). This means, you are well within your rights to use, modify and re-distribute any wordpress theme or plugin. If that’s not enough, any wordpress theme or plugin you download from the official WordPress.org theme / plugin directory is covered by this license. So, you have full rights to do what you please with your website which includes removing powered by credit link from the Footer.

With that out of the way, I will show you how to edit or  even completely remove footer credits from WordPress. Let’s get into the topic.

Steps to Remove WordPress Footer Credits Links

There are many ways to hide or remove wordpress footer credit links, I am going to explain all the possible ways to remove powered by links in the footer but before that, you need to take a backup of your website so that you won’t lose your valuable content.

Always Have Backup

Always have a backup before making any changes on your website. It’s always a good idea to backup the contents, so that if anything goes wrong or if you did something wrong accidentally, you can immediately fix it by restoring your website to an earlier version.

You can either take backup of your entire website from FTP (File Transfer Protocol) account or if you use any WP Backup plugin, you can schedule your site backup automatically with a snapshot or even you can take the manual backup using backup plugins. Now that we have covered the backup part, let’s delve in and explore the various methods through which you can remove “powered by wordpress” footer credits from your wordpress blog.

Hide the Copyright Credits from the WordPress Footer

Yes, instead of completely removing the code from your website, you can simply hide the footer credits from the blog using CSS. However, I don’t recommend this method until you don’t want to go with any other options mentioned below. Reason for that, using CSS Method might put your site’s SEO at risk.

Search Engines doesn’t like hiding links using “display:none” because that’s the technique spammers use to hide links from the website visitors while still show it to Search Engines (to get higher rankings for the keywords). Your site might get penalised for using such technique. So, we strongly suggest not to use this method. If you still want to use this simple method, you will need access to your wordpress Admin panel to do so.

Using CSS Method:

Follow the below steps to use this quick and easy but unsavoury method which deserves a mention.

  1. Login as an Admin to your wp-admin dashboard
  2. Go to “Appearance > Customize” at the bottom of the menu.
  3. Go to the Additional CSS section of the Customizer.
  4. Paste the below given CSS Code

.site-info{
display:none;
}

That’s it. You’ve been successful in hiding the footer credits. As I mentioned earlier, use this method only when you don’t have other options.

Remove Footer Credits from your WordPress Blog using Theme Customizer

You might not find this option in all free themes but in the pro themes you will have an option to remove footer credits with simple settings. Some free themes will have an option to remove the footer credits with simple settings.

  1. Login as an Admin to your wp-admin dashboard
  2. Go to Appearance and Click on Customize option.
  3. Click on the Footer Section
  4. Disable the Footer Credits or Edit it to add your personalised Footer.

As I mentioned earlier, you may not find this option in all the themes but if you find this option in the theme you’re using, simply use the above option to get rid of Footer credits from your wordpress blog. With this option, you can also add you personalised copyright credits to you blog footer.

Themes that support the removal of Copyright Footer:

Remove Powered by WordPress from Footer using .PHP File

The above mentioned method only available in certain themes only. Now, I am going to explain one of the best method to remove footer credits from your wordpress blog. You can either do it offline FTP method or Online (Live). For off-line, you need to download footer.php file from the ftp, edit the code and upload the file to the server. For online method, you can follow the below steps.

1. Login into your wp-admin dashboard, Scroll to the Appearance and Click on Editor.

2. Find the footer.php file and check for the footer credits.

3. Once you find the correct file, select and delete the proudly powered by wordpress text and click on update file.

Quick Tip: Before making any changes to your wordpress theme, it’s good to create a child theme and make changed in the child theme, rather than directly edit your main theme code. Reasons behind this…

  1. Any update which bring your theme upto the latest version could potentially undo all your hard work and bring the footer credentials back again.
  2. By modifying the code directly on the live website, there’s a chance that you could modify / delete the wrong code and break your live website.
  3. Having a backup copy of the code will help you in such situations.

In-case, if you don’t know how to create a wordpress child theme, I will have another blog on creating it.

Remove Powered by WordPress footer credits using Plugins.

If you don’t want to take any risk by modifying / deleting the code from, This method is the very best option for you. The plugin does all the code work for you, you just have to install and do simple settings in the plugin. Don’t worry, I will walk you through the step by step process of using the plugin to remove footer credits from the wordpress blog.

1. Log into your WP Admin panel, hover to plugins and click on “Add New”.

2. Search for “Remove Footer Credit” plugin.

3. Install and Activate the plugin.

4. Now, go to the Tools and click on “Remove Footer Credit” option.

5. Add the content (Footer Credits) you want to remove in the Step 1 and click on Save button.

You can add your personalised text in the footer credits section by adding the content in the Step 2. You just have to add the text / html you want to add to the footer credits and click on the Save button.

That’s it.. You’ve successfully removed “Proudly powered by WordPress” footer credits from your wordpress blog

Conclusion

Above tips will help you to remove the footer credits but choose the best and easy method and have a backup before making any modification. Use FTP if you want to edit the file and then upload it to the server. Also, use the child theme if you want to make the modifications on a live website.

I hope you found this blog useful for removing footer credits from your wordpress blog. As mentioned above, there are several methods to remove the powered by wordpress credits from your blog, choose the easy and best one to finish the task. If you have any questions about removing wordpress copyright footer credits from your website, please don’t hesitate to drop a comment below. Also, if I missed any point or if you need any specific help from me feel free to drop a message.

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About Author

Kranthi

Digital Marketing Consultant by Profession, Blogger by passion. Loves to blog about technology, marketing, blogging. Waiting for the right time to become an Entrepreneur.

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