How To Remove “powered by wordpress”

WordPress is widely considered the most popular content management system (CMS). It supports more than 60 million websites and, as of February 2017, it was used by a reported 27.5% of the top 10 million websites in the world. Of course, this comes as no surprise to its many users who enjoy its intuitive tool set, making it easy to create and customize websites and blogs.

You might have seen some of these websites and know them by the “Proudly Powered by WordPress” footer attached to the bottom of each page. Some websites wear this tag proudly. However, others worry that telling the world they are “Powered by WordPress” makes them look unprofessional.

What’s Wrong With Being Proudly Powered by WordPress?

Your average blogger probably doesn’t bat an eye at this little WordPress advertisement. In fact, some might even like it, knowing the stellar reputation that the CMS has. However, those who use a WordPress hosted website for a professional organization might feel self-conscious about it. After all, the biggest companies are likely to hire professional web designers for customized builds. Not every company can afford to do this. That’s why it’s so nice that we have tools like WordPress to make website creation possible for those of us who don’t have a programmer in our back pocket. But that doesn’t change the fact that we might like to pretend that we do.

Wait, Are We Even Allowed to Remove It?

“Proudly Powered by WordPress” is WordPress’s signature on your site. It makes sense that you might be concerned about the legal ramifications of removing it. Rest assured, that doing so is not against the rules or the law.

WordPress uses a General Public License (GPL). This means that users are allowed to run, share, or even modify the software. Have you ever heard of a WordPress programmer? These people are allowed to edit the code for a WordPress site that they have administrative access to without needing any special permission from WordPress itself. You too can be a WordPress programmer and edit the code that places the “Powered by WordPress” footer on your site.

How Do I Remove “Proudly Powered by WordPress”?

Brace yourself. This is going to sound complicated, but it is not as hard as it seems. There are two different ways that you can go about removing the footer. The first is a tad simpler, but the second is preferable for reasons we will go into in a moment.

Method One: Edit Style.css

1. Log in to your WordPress account.

2. Go to your WordPress Dashboard.

3. Locate Appearance on the left-hand side and hover over it.

4. Click Editor from the drop-down that appears.

5. Click style.css (this should be open by default).

6. Paste the following code at the bottom of the style.css file.

In some places, the code is shown to inhabit three lines. If the above paste doesn’t work for you, try this:

Note that the numbers are not part of the code, but simply there to indicate the number of lines the code inhabits.

Method Two: Edit Footer.php

1. Log in to your WordPress account.

2. Go to your WordPress Dashboard.

3. Locate Appearance on the left-hand side and hover over it.

4. Click Editor from the drop-down that appears.

5. Click footer.php.

6. Locate the following lines of code and remove them.

Note that the numbers in red are not part of the code. They are there to indicate that the code will be in 12 lines in your PHP file. Also note that certain elements may be slightly different depending on your WordPress theme. Suffice it to say, you want to find a line starting with <div class=”site-info”> and delete that along with the following 11 lines.

Help, I Can’t Find the Editor!

Not everyone is going to have access to the CSS and PHP files mentioned above. Your access to these files will depend on your membership level and whether you’re using WordPress.com or the locally installed app from WordPress.org.

If you are using WordPress online, you’ll need to upgrade to a Premium account to get access to advanced customization options. If you’ve downloaded WordPress and are using it on your machine, you shouldn’t need to purchase additional options to perform these functions. However, setting WordPress up locally is not a simple task.

A Note of Caution About CSS

As we mentioned before, option one is not without its drawbacks. When you edit the PHP file, you are deleting the link. However, when you edit the CSS file, you’re simply hiding it. This can cause problems with SEO. Google is not a fan of hidden links. Spammers often use hidden links to infect web pages. If Google detects that your site has a hidden link, no matter how innocuous, your ranking may be effected.  For this reason, method two is most recommended.