The Expert Series: 3 Ways You Can Change Your Footer in WordPress

Once a new site is created and you got exactly the design and functionality of everything you want, it’s time for the finishing touches. One of the elements we could work on is the footer and more precisely – the ‘proudly powered by WordPress’ text or if any other text you might be getting there that you do not want users to see for various of reasons.

No worries we have you covered. Here we will see the different ways you could remove or change this text to anything you would like.

How to hide/replace the text using CSS

Using CSS might be a bit intimidating if you aren’t used to it, so if you do feel insecure about it you can choose any of the next options or you can always ask us for assistance with it if you are having any troubles with this.

To edit the CSS on your WordPress site please go to your wp-admin >> Appearance >> Customize >> Custom/Additional CSS and paste something like:

.site-info { display: none; }

To find the proper id for your theme, you could right-click on the footer text and select inspect element in your browser to find the proper ID to set the display value for.

You could also do the following:

.site-info { display: none; }

.site-info:after { content: “your new text”; }

This will hide the old text and place right after that element a new one.

Please keep in mind though that this is a quick fix, but may not be the best for your site and may affect your SEO more or less because of the links that are usually in the site-info and how Google reacts to hidden links.

How to hide/change the text from within the Theme

Some themes have this option within their own settings so you might want to check this first before making any amendments to any code. To check if your theme has those options available please go to either one of those places:

Wp-admin >> Appearance >> Footer >> Copyright/Footer text

Or

Wp-admin >> Appearance >> Widgets >> Footer

Or

Wp-admin >> Appearance >> Theme options >> Footer >> show copyright text

From there you would be able to have the ability to change or hide this text if this option is available. Please note that theme can be quite different one from another, so your options could also be named differently.

Change the text from the footer.php in your theme

You can also get a very direct approach by editing the footer.php file in your theme. You can log into your hosting, find your footer.php and locate something like the following:

printf( __( ‘Proudly powered by %s.’, ‘twentynineteen’ ), ‘WordPress’ );

You can change the text from there to whatever you would like. Please note however, that if you update your theme – this change may disappear, so you might want to use a child theme instead. You can read more on child themes here.