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5 Easy Steps to Edit the Footer in WordPress

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If you’re looking for step-by-step instructions on editing the footer in your WordPress website, this article is for you.

There are many ways to utilize your site’s footer space. You could use it to add the links to your privacy policy or affiliate disclosure, add attractive social media icons, an email opt-in box, or a small text snippet from your About page.

Or maybe you just want to remove “Proudly powered by WordPress” from the bottom of your site.

Whatever it is, we’ve got you covered.

What Is A WordPress Footer?

A footer is an area that appears at the bottom of a website after the main body content. Just like a site’s header, the footer also usually appears on every page of a site.

For example, here’s the footer of the CrazyEgg blog.

Most sites use their footer area to house important links like disclaimers, privacy policy, and other key pages of your site.

In WordPress, the footer exists as a separate file named footer.php, which loads with every page of your site. So any changes that you make to footer.php will reflect across your site.

Why Editing The Footer In WordPress is Worth It

The footer appears on every page of your WordPress site. You can’t just waste this space with unimportant links or default messaging from your WordPress theme.

You should use your site’s footer to your advantage by highlighting essential links you can’t feature in the header. 

The footer also gives you an excellent opportunity to strengthen your brand image and make a long-lasting impression on your visitors.

Instead of leaving this space empty or with useless information, you can add your logo to it along with a quick introduction to your brand or a punch line that captures the essence of your business.

The site’s footer is also critical from an SEO perspective. Since it appears on every page of your site, any links in the footer will be considered site-wide links. Never use this space to stuff keywords or internal links to get more page authority. Only feature links that are useful to your audience or legally required.

These are just some of the reasons why you should always edit your WordPress site’s footer after installing a theme.

Thankfully, most WordPress themes come with dedicated options to edit the footer, which means you don’t need to open footer.php to edit the code manually. Tinkering directly with footer.php is not recommended because if anything goes wrong with the code, footer.php will stop loading, and your site will stop working.

The Investment Needed to Edit the Footer in WordPress

Whether you’re using a free or premium WordPress theme for your site, editing the footer doesn’t require any monetary investment.

If you understand coding, you can directly edit footer.php from your WordPress dashboard. But, as I’ve already mentioned, we don’t recommend that method.

Instead, there are several secure methods with which you can add images, text, links, or menus to your site’s footer.

Here are the methods that I’ll cover in this post.

  • Using WordPress Customizer
  • Using WordPress Widgets
  • Using a WordPress plugin

There are many free and premium WordPress plugins to edit your site’s footer. In my opinion, the free plugins do the job well. But if you prefer to use premium plugins, you can add that as a potential investment when editing your WordPress site’s footer.

Other than that, you only need to invest some time to edit your footer.

5 Ways To Edit the Footer in WordPress

Let’s now explore the different ways you can edit your WordPress site’s footer. 

Edit Footer With WordPress Theme Customizer

The WordPress Theme Customizer is an option in your WordPress dashboard that allows you to customize your site’s appearance, edit its header and footer, change its titles, and many other universal settings.

This is the most secure and user-friendly way to edit the footer in WordPress.

Here are the steps you need to follow.

Note: We’re using a popular WordPress theme named Astra, which has additional customization options. But you’ll find the footer editing options in every theme.

Sign in to your WordPress dashboard.

Go to Appearance → Customize.

In the website customization menu, click on Footer.

You can edit the footer by using widgets to add new sections or by editing the content and style of the footer bar. Click on Footer Bar to continue.

In this section, you can edit the footer layout and text. Use the text box to change the default text of your site’s theme.

Scroll down this page to get different styling options for your site’s footer.

When you make the desired changes, click Publish to save your footer settings.

You’ve successfully edited your WordPress site’s footer. 

You can always come back to this section if you want to add or remove something from your site’s footer in the future.

Add Widgets To Your WordPress Footer

Widgets are among the most valuable features in WordPress. These are small content blocks that you can drag & drop in different sections of your site to insert text, videos, images, HTML code, etc.

Most WordPress themes give you the option to use widgets in the footer as well.

Here’s how you can use them to edit your WordPress site’s footer.

Log in to your WordPress site’s dashboard.

Go to Appearance → Widgets.

On this page, you’ll see multiple footer sections. These are the different blocks within your site’s footer that you can edit using widgets. Click on Footer Widget Area 1 to open it.

On the left side of the Widgets page, you can see different widgets that you can drag and drop to the different footer bar sections. Click and drag the Custom HTML widget to Footer Bar Section 1.

You can copy any script or code to this footer widget. Once you’re done, click Save.

The text widget is also quite popular and comes with the standard WordPress editor and the full formatting options, including adding media. Drag it to Footer Bar Section 2.

After entering your text, click Save to publish the widget in your footer.

As you can see, editing your site’s footer using widgets is even easier than the previous method.

Add A Menu To WordPress Footer

Most website owners add one or more navigation menus to their site’s footer. These are often secondary menus that consist of links that aren’t important enough to feature in your header but still important for your users.

Here’s how you can create such menus for your site’s footer.

Sign in to your WordPress site’s dashboard

Go to Appearance → Menus.

Click on create a new menu.

Give your footer menu a unique name that’s easily identifiable.

In Menu Settings under Display Location, select the checkbox next to Footer Menu.

Click Create Menu to finish the basic setup of your menu and move to the next step.

You have successfully created your footer menu, but now you need to choose the links that appear in it. Select all the relevant pages from Add menu items.

Click Add to Menu to move these pages to your footer menu.

You can also add any posts, custom links, and categories to your menu from the “add menu items” section.

Once you add all the pages to your menu, you can drag them into any order you like.

Click Save Menu to publish it in your site’s footer.

That was the process for adding a new menu to your WordPress site’s footer.

But if you want to add an existing menu to your footer, follow these steps:

Click on Manage Location on the Menus page.

Click on the dropdown next to Footer Menu and choose a menu from the list.

Click Save Changes to publish the menu in your site’s footer.

You have successfully created a footer menu for your WordPress site. To place it in the footer, go to Appearance → Widgets from your WordPress dashboard.

Click on the Footer Widget Area where you want to place the menu.

Now drag the Navigation Menu widget to the Footer Widget Area.

Give your menu a title (optional).

From the dropdown below the title field, select the menu you created for your site’s footer.

Click Save to publish the changes.

Your new menu will now display in the footer area of your WordPress site. Using this same process, you can create multiple menus for your site’s footer.

Add An HTML Code Or Script To The Footer

Many site owners usually place different scripts and tracking codes of applications like Google Analytics, etc., in their footer.

If you want to do the same or ad any kind of code to your site’s footer, here’s the process you need to follow.

Log in to your WordPress dashboard.

Go to Plugins → Add New

Search for the plugin “Insert Headers and Footers” in the search bar.

Locate the Insert Headers and Footers plugin and click Install.

Click Activate.

Now go to Settings → Insert Headers and Footers on your WordPress dashboard.

On the plugin’s page, scroll down to Scripts in Footer.

Copy your code/script in this text box.

Click Save to publish the changes.

You’ve successfully added your script between the <body></body> tags of your site’s footer.php file.

Remove “Powered By WordPress” From The Footer

The default footer text in many WordPress themes is “Powered by WordPress.” If you want to remove this text, you’ll need to edit your site’s footer.

You can do this through Appearance → Customizer in your WordPress dashboard in some themes, as I’ve already shown in this post.

But if your theme’s customization options don’t allow editing the footer, you’ll need to remove it by editing the code of your site’s footer.php file.

We don’t usually recommend editing the code directly, but this one’s simple.

Here’s how to do it.

Note: We’ve used the TwentySixteen WordPress theme for this example.

Sign in to your site’s WordPress dashboard.

Go to Appearance → Theme Editor.

In the Theme Files list on the right of your screen, find and click on footer.php.

Before editing the code of this file, press CTRL+A to select the code and press CTRL+C to copy it.

Now, open a new Notepad file on your computer. Paste the code in the blank Notepad file. This is your code’s backup in case anything goes wrong.

Back in the footer.php window, press CTRL+F to open the text search box. Type “powered by” into the search box.

Select and remove the highlighted line from your code.

Click Update File.

You’ve successfully removed “Powered by WordPress” from your site’s footer.

Next Steps

As I’ve shown you in detail, editing the footer of your WordPress website is not difficult at all. There are multiple ways to edit your footer, and none of them takes more than a few minutes of your time.

Using the methods I’ve explained, you can edit your site’s footer in many other ways, such as adding social media icons, adding a Google Maps widget, adding an email opt-in box widget, etc.


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