At the bottom of many web sites, you’ll find something called, common-sensically enough “the footer”. WordPress treats the footer as a special element, and while you can do many things with it, or create other elements that look like but aren’t the footer, changing the WordPress footer away from its basic function of providing information you want on every page of your site is generally a bad idea.

What goes in your footer is up to you, but commonly what you see there is a copyright notice and credits for site design. In the image above we’ve displayed the footers from The WordPress Helpers, our sister services Answer Guy Central and Video Network One, and our parent company. All of the sites are built using WordPress, and in all cases getting them to look as they do required changing the WordPress footer.

When you set up WordPress your initial footer will have been determined by the author of your theme. WordPress sites hosted at WordPress.com require you to leave the footer alone, at least insofar as it credits WordPress as host and designer. Themes you either buy or get for free and host in your own WordPress installations have different rules; generally, themes you pay for allow you to remove or alter the credits, and while it’s often possible to do that with free themes, accepted convention is that if you got a theme for free you should leave credit to the theme author in it.

Is it really as simple as that? Few things are. But it’s a start; changing the WordPress footer is one of those many things that you need to keep in mind as you roll out … or change … a WordPress site. Need help? We’re right here.

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Article Title:

Changing The WordPress Footer

Subject:

The WordPress Footer is valuable real estate, so is Changing The WordPress Footer OK? How do you do that, and where does the WordPress footer come from?

Author:

The WordPress Helpers