How to Remove Proudly Powered by WordPress from WordPress Themes
You create a WordPress website with a beautiful design and engaging content. Your website is all set to go live. Suddenly, you notice something unusual in the footer section of your website – Proudly powered by WordPress. This is something very irritating. Right? Do you want to get rid of that unwanted thing that is right there in the footer section? The objective of this article is to help you deal with one of the most common WordPress problems faced by many users. After reading this article, hopefully, you will be able to remove proudly powered by WordPress from your website footer.
Proudly Powered by WordPress
The best approach to resolve an issue is by understanding the reason first – why the problem has occurred. If the message “Proudly powered by WordPress” appears in the footer of your website, you should find out the reason what it appears before you can start fixing it. Generally, the above message appears in the footer of your website if you are using a free theme. As you know, there are two types of WordPress themes: Free Themes and Premium Themes. Most WordPress users use free themes for their websites. Almost all the free themes provided by WordPress have that text in the footer – Proudly powered by WordPress.
If you are running a business or personal website, it does not make any sense to keep that unwanted text anywhere on your website. It may give your website a very unprofessional look. Some of you might think if it is legal to remove proudly powered by WordPress text from your website footer. Yes, it is! You will not get into any trouble if you remove WordPress footer. WordPress is free, and it is released under the GPL license aka General Public License. This means, being an open-source software platform, WordPress can be used, modified, and/or extended by anyone.
The GPL license also covers all the themes (be it free or premium) available in the official theme directory of WordPress.org. So you are free to make the desired changes to the WordPress theme including removing WordPress footer text.
How to Remove Proudly Powered by WordPress?
Now the question is – how to remove WordPress footer from the website. Do I have to pay for it or use any 3rd party software to do that? Do I need to hire a professional to do that? These are a few questions that may come to your mind? A newbie WordPress user is completely unaware of the methods to remove proudly powered by WordPress from the website footer. Luckily, you do not need to use any software or require any web designer/developer’s help. You can do that by yourself without paying anything. There are three different methods that you can use to remove WordPress footer from the website:
- You can remove proudly powered by WordPress from the theme settings
- You can also remove WordPress footer from the Footer.php section
- Or you can use a plugin to remove footer credit from the WordPress website
These are the highly recommended methods to remove proudly powered by WordPress from your website. However, you should always take a backup of your website before making any changes. So if anything goes wrong, you can restore your website to the previous version by using the backup. Many people lose their valuable information or sometimes the whole website when they do not have a backup. You never want to face such an awful situation. So it is better to back up your WordPress website regularly.
Use the Site Editor ( WordPress 5.9 or greater )
On January 25, 2022, WordPress released its major update version 5.9 which includes its Site Editor feature. It also includes the new Twenty Twenty Two theme which supports the Site Editor. To remove Proudly Powered by WordPress in Twenty Twenty Two theme, navigate to Appearance and then Editor
You’ll enter the Site Editor mode of WordPress. Now click on the top center dropdown to open the templates this Home Page is using. Select Footer from the options as shown in the screenshot below.
Once you click that, your screen will scroll down to the Footer section. Now Click on the Proudly Powered by WordPress text and you’ll have some options on top of it to edit it. Just click the 3 vertical dots on the right and click on the Remove Paragraph. Check the screenshot below. Save page to see changes.
If the WordPress theme you are using does not have the option to remove proudly powered by WordPress, you should try to edit the Footer.php page. It does not require any prior coding knowledge. Every WordPress theme has a separate Footer.php file. You need to do a little bit of editing in the file. If you are using the default WordPress theme, i.e. Twenty Twenty One, follow these simple steps:
Step 1: First, go to the WordPress dashboard. From the Appearance menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard, select the Theme Editor option to bring up the theme editing screen.
Step 2: If you have multiple WordPress themes installed, you need to select the theme in which you want to make changes. For example, select Twenty Twenty One. After that, under the Theme Files section, select Theme Footer (footer.php).
This will open the footer.php file in the editor. See the below screenshot.
You need to make changes to the above-highlighted code in the editor. Either you can remove that or modify it as desired. Removing that part will remove proudly powered by WordPress from your website footer. And if you modify that, it will be shown in the Website footer accordingly.
Note: In case you are using Twenty Seventeen or any other WordPress theme similar to this one, you need to edit the site-info.php file instead of footer.php. Under the Theme Files section, go to template-parts > footer > site-info.php.
Then you need to make changes to the above-highlighted code in the editor. Either you can remove that or modify it as desired. Removing that part will remove proudly powered by WordPress from your website footer. And if you modify that, it will be shown in the Website footer accordingly.
Use the Theme Settings Page
The very first thing you should consider using is the theme settings page. Most of the free WordPress themes have the option to remove the WordPress footer. Generally, the option is available on the theme settings page. Different WordPress themes may have this option in different sections. However, you should always look for it in the WordPress theme customizer.
Many WordPress themes have options to remove the WordPress footer link as well as customize it. Follow the steps given below:
Step 1: First, go to the WordPress dashboard. From the Appearance menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard, select the Customize option to bring up the Theme Customized screen.
Step 2: On the left-hand side navigation pane, you will find an option – Copyright Area (if your theme supports this feature).
You can either change the footer note or completely remove it from the website.
Use WordPress Plugin
If you find the above method a little bit tricky or complicated, you can simply use a plugin to remove proudly powered by WordPress from your website footer. There are a few plugins available in the WordPress Plugin directory that can remove WordPress footer credit from your website. The Remove Footer Credit and Easy Remove Footer Credit plugins are good choices. These plugins are highly compatible with most WordPress themes. They allow you to remove the footer credit as well as modify it as desired.
It is very easy to use this WordPress plugin for removing WordPress footer text. We are taking an example of the plugin Remove Footer Credit. First, go to the Plugin directory, then download, install, and activate it. After that, the Remove Footer Credit plugin is ready to use.
Step 1: First, go to the WordPress dashboard. From the Tools menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard, select the Remove Footer Credit option to bring up the Remove Footer Credit screen.
Step 2: On the Remove Footer Credit screen, there are 3 different steps:
- In Step 1, you need to enter the text/HTML that you want to remove from the Website footer. For example, Powered by WordPress.
- In Step 2, you need to enter your footer credit, i.e. whatever you want to show in the footer section of your website.
- Step 3 is optional. You may leave it.
Step 3: Then click Save.
Attention Please
Some articles and blogs may suggest you try editing CSS to hide WordPress footer credit. You should not follow this approach because doing so may put your website ranking at high risk. Search engine like Google does not like this trick of hiding the site info. Generally, spammers use this cheap trick to hide links from the users. Google often flags such websites, and if you follow this approach, then your website will also get flagged by Google. As a result, your website may lose search engine ranking.
Conclusion
I hope, after reading this article, you can now easily remove proudly powered by WordPress. There are various methods given in this article that can you follow.
