Remove Proudly Powered by WordPress from the Footer

If you have ever wanted to remove the “Proudly powered by WordPress” message from the footer of many WordPress themes, you’ll discover two . This tutorial will guide you through the whole process! It’s a bit tricky but make sure you do everything according to these instructions and you’ll have no problem at all. Get ready, cause we’re starting right now!

You can either watch the detailed video tutorial below or scroll below that to read the image/text version of the tutorial.

There are two places the “proudly powered by WordPress” message exists in the WordPress back end. Either in the theme options panel if your theme has one or in the footer.php template file.

I’ll show you both ways to remove the pesky message from the footer of your theme with the footer.php editing first.

Removal Process for Themes Without Theme Option Panels

What you need to do first is find the footer.php file inside the editor. To find the footer.php file, go to your dashboard hover over Appearance, then click on Editor.

The footer.php file will be on the right-hand side of the editor page. Find it and click on it. If you can’t find it use ctrl+f or command+f and type in footer.php inside the search box. This tool will help you find the desired file by highlighting it. When you have found it, click on it to open it.

Now with the footer.php file contents displayed, type ctrl+f or command+f again and search for the text proudly powered by WordPress. If that’s not the exact message you’re trying to remove then search for your message.

If all goes well, the search will take you right to the text and you can delete it. Just make sure you don’t delete anything except for the text. Because this is a PHP file, if you delete the wrong symbol somewhere or add a period where there shouldn’t be one, you’re site will go down.

If that happens, just find the error and fix it. Then your site will be back up.

There are times when simply searching for the text won’t turn up what the text in the source code.

In that case you have to go back to the live page and right click on the “proudly powered by message” and then click on Inspect.

Now we can do another search inside the inspector by typing the ctrl+f or command+f process and then searching for the text.

Hopefully you’ll see the message wrapped by a div or something else. Often that wrapper is in the footer.php source code. Remember or copy the class name of the wrapper and go back into the editor in your WordPress admin.

Now, search again with the new information you’ve found.

If you still can’t find it, go back to the inspector to find a class that is up one level. In this case, the class is called wrap. Copy the word wrap and try to find it inside your footer.php code.

This one worked! In the twenty seventeen footer.php file there are two instances of wraps, the opening and the closing tags for the wrap div.

You might be thinking of erasing the whole thing, but that’s probably not a good plan because you’ll be losing lots of other content.

For example, the first part inside the wrap div allows widgets to be added to the footer. You can learn more about that the video it’s not core to the topic of this article.

If you’re a beginner at HTML and PHP, you may find it difficult to find the code for the message you want to remove. However, the most logical part to delete is the final part since it’s safe to suppose that the “proudly powered by WordPress” message is the last part of the code. The only plausible part is the one highlighted on the screenshot below.

Remove this part by commenting out the code. You do that by adding two forward slashes (//) in front of it and then update the file. Now refresh the live page and check to see the message is gone.

Now, let’s try setting a new one. You do that by going back to the footer.php editor and typing in echo, Copyright 2017 WP-PHD under quotation marks and followed by a semi-colon (see the screenshot below):

You’ll see that a new message is inserted and it can be anything you want.

This was the most difficult way to find the “Proudly powered by WordPress” message. Most of the themes will have it clearly stated inside the footer.php file, but I prepared you for the worst case scenario. Now, all that is left is to show you how to change the message for themes which have the theme options panel.

Changing the Message for Themes with Theme Option Panels

Activate another theme, such as Avada, to see how to change the message automatically, without any coding involved.

Click on the to the Theme Options link under the Avada menu. There are two of them in this case, just click on any one of them.

Go to Footer then Footer Content and scroll down to see the Copyright text box. Simply change the text in that box and you’re done.

This process is way easier than adding the code manually, but we are at the mercy what the theme developer creates. Hopefully the developer of your theme was merciful!
That’s all for this tutorial. If you think it might be helpful to one or two of your friends, share it and hopefully someone else will learn what you’ve learnt today. Leave your comments below, don’t be a stranger!

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