WordPress is a great platform for build many types of websites, but you might not want to advertise that your site is running on WordPress. Some business in particular may want to remove the “Powered by WordPress” credit that is in the footer of WordPress Themes. The good news is that this is a really easy update and shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes, regardless your technical ability. There are three ways to remove the “Powered by WordPress” footer credit: Using a theme option, editing the PHP of your website, editing the CSS. Note avoid editing your CSS file to hide the powered by WordPress credit if at all possible – more on this below. (btw, check out my favorite WP theme – aff link)
Use Theme Options to Remove Powered by WordPress
Many theme developers are well aware that website owners do not want to display the Powered by WordPress link in the footer and proactively create an easy setting to remove this credit. If your theme offers this option, you will likely find it in your theme’s settings, in a widgets module, or under “Appearance” > “Customize” menu option. In my theme, Divi (aff link), there is the option to disable the Powered by WordPress footer link by clicking “Appearance” in the left hand WP menu, and then selecting “Customize”.
From here, I simply have to select “Footer” > “Bottom Bar”. In this menu Divi provides a checkbox to disable to footer credits. All I have to do is check this box and hit save. There are a couple advantages of this approach. First, by selecting a theme setting you don’t have to worry about installing a theme update and overwriting and code based methods used to hide the WP credit in the footer. Second, this is the least technical approach so if you aren’t experienced in modifying WordPress themes, you don’t have to worry about breaking your site :-)
Remove Powered by WordPress in Your footer.php File
The next way to remove the WordPress credit link in the footer is to update your footer.php file. This is where the WordPress credit is created. You simply have to remove the credit in this file and the “Proudly Powered by WordPress” link will no longer appear on your site. While this might sound a little intimidating to people who haven’t done many modifications to their WordPress files before, it’s really not that hard.
This theme is located in /wp-content/themes/your-theme-name/footer.php. To access this you can use a ftp program and a file editor, or more simply, you can edit the file directly in WordPress! To edit the footer.php file in WordPress directly, click on “Appearance” in the left hand menu and then select “Editor”. Once you do this, you should see a screen like the one below. At this point, you will want to look for your footer.php file in the list of pages on the right.
Once you are looking at the footer.php file, you can simply search for “powered by” and you should find the relevant code. Simply remove line of code referencing “Proudly Powered by WordPress” and click update.
In the example above, from the twentysixteen theme, the line of code that you want to remove is:
<a href="<?php echo esc_url( __( 'https://wordpress.org/', 'twentysixteen' ) ); ?>"><?php printf( __( 'Proudly powered by %s', 'twentysixteen' ), 'WordPress' ); ?></a>
Some themes won’t show the link directly in the footer.php file. In my theme, Divi, we see the following line in-place of the <a> link shown in the above example:
echo et_get_footer_credits();
This means that the footer file is calling a function to generate the powered by WordPress credit rather than hard coding it directly into the footer.php file. To remove the WP credit, we’ll simply remove this line referencing the link instead of an actual <a> link.
A couple words of caution with this method:
- Always back up your original file incase you break something
- If you ever update your WordPress theme, you’ll need to go in and remove this WP credit link again
Hide Powered by WordPress in Your CSS File (do at your own risk)
If you Google “how to remove powered by WordPress”, you’ll surely find countless sites telling you that the easiest and quickest fix is to simply update your CSS file to hide this footer link. While this will work, it should be avoided at all costs. Hiding content, and especially links is something that Google strongly dislikes and will often penalize sites for. Links in footers tend to exist primarily for SEO. Hiding links in your footer is a very likely way to get yourself in trouble with Google and negatively impact your SEO. With this in mind, I strongly recommend avoiding this approach.
To remove the powered by WordPress link in your footer via CSS, go to “Appearance” in the left hand nav. Then select “Customize” and then choose “Additional CSS”. In this box simply enter the following code and hit update:
.site-info { display: none; }
This will simply hide the link, not truly get rid of it.
In summary:
How to Remove Powered by WordPress Link
- Check to see if your theme offers built in functionality to remove the WordPress credit
- If it does not, go to your footer.php file in the editor
- Remove the reference to “Powered by WordPress” or the function calling the link
- Do not use the CSS method to hide the Powered by WordPress link