Do you need to edit the foot­er area of your Word­Press web­site? The foot­er area appears at the bot­tom of each page on your Word­Press site., 

There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent ways web­site own­ers can uti­lize this area and make it more use­ful for their web­site visitors. 

In this arti­cle, we will show you how to edit the foot­er in WordPress.

What is the Footer in WordPress?

The ‘foot­er’ in Word­Press is the bot­tom part of your web­site that appears after the con­tent area. It nor­mal­ly appears on all pages on your website. 

This part of the web­site is locat­ed far down below and is often ignored by most begin­ners for a long time. How­ev­er, there are sev­er­al ways you can uti­lize this area by mak­ing it more help­ful for your users, Word­Press SEO, and your business. 

All top Word­Press themes come with foot­er wid­get area that’s easy to edit. You can also care­ful­ly edit the footer.php tem­plate file in your theme to remove unwant­ed links from this area. 

That being said, let’s take a look at how to eas­i­ly edit the foot­er in Word­Press. You can use the fol­low­ing links to jump to the sec­tion you want to read. 

• Adding wid­gets in your footer
• Remov­ing the ‘Pow­ered by Word­Press’ text from your footer
• Adding code to Word­Press footer

Editing Widgets in Your Footer in WordPress

Many pop­u­lar Word­Press themes have wid­get areas in the footer. 

You can use these wid­get areas to add text, images, or links to your pri­va­cy pol­i­cy and legal dis­claimers in the foot­er area. 

Adding text and images is quite straight for­ward. You can sim­ply go to the Appear­ance » Wid­gets page and add a Text, Image, or Gallery wid­get to your foot­er wid­get area.

To add a wid­get, sim­ply drag and drop it into a foot­er area. If you need more help, then see our arti­cle on how to add and use wid­gets in Word­Press.

Note that many themes will have mul­ti­ple foot­er areas, and they may use them dif­fer­ent­ly. You can pre­view your web­site after adding wid­gets to make sure that they appear where you want them to be. 

Adding Links in Foot­er Wid­get Area

You may also want to add links to dif­fer­ent pages, cat­e­gories, or to the legal pages of your web­site in the foot­er area.

Word­Press comes with an easy to to man­age those links using the nav­i­ga­tion menus. Sim­ply head over to the Appear­ance » Menus page and click on the ‘cre­ate new menu’ link. 

Word­Press will ask you to pro­vide a name for your new menu. Enter a name that helps you eas­i­ly iden­ti­fy this menu and then click on the ‘Cre­ate Menu’ button. 

Your menu is now ready and you can start adding links to it. Sim­ply select the pages, posts, cat­e­gories from the left col­umn to add them to your menu. 

Once you are fin­ished, click on the Save Menu but­ton to store your changes. For more help, see our arti­cle on how to cre­ate nav­i­ga­tion menus in Word­Press.

Your menu is now ready to be added to the Word­Press foot­er wid­get area. Sim­ply vis­it the Appear­ance » Wid­gets page in your Word­Press admin and then add the Nav­i­ga­tion Menu wid­get to your foot­er area. 

In the wid­get set­tings, select the foot­er nav­i­ga­tion menu you cre­at­ed ear­li­er from the drop­down menu and click on the Save button. 

You can now vis­it your web­site to see your foot­er links in action. 

You can cre­ate mul­ti­ple nav­i­ga­tion menus in Word­Press and add as many nav­i­ga­tion menu wid­gets to your side­bar as you need. If you need anoth­er set of links sim­ply repeat the same steps again. 

Removing the ‘Powered by WordPress’ Text from Your Footer

When you first install Word­Press, your site may have a ‘Pow­ered by Word­Press’ link in a foot­er bar at the bot­tom. This isn’t a wid­get, so it’s often not clear how to change it.

Some themes will alter this to their own text and link. If so, you can nor­mal­ly change this text using the live theme cus­tomiz­er. Sim­ply go to Themes » Cus­tomiz­er in your Word­Press admin. Look for an option to edit your site footer:

We’re using the Astra theme for this exam­ple. With Astra, you need to go to Foot­er » Foot­er Bar in the cus­tomiz­er. You will then have the option to change the text of your foot­er bar:

Once you’ve fin­ished edit­ing the text, don’t for­get to click the Pub­lish but­ton at the top of the screen to put your changes live.

Go ahead and view your site to see your new footer:

For more help, take a look at our in-depth guide to the Word­Press theme cus­tomiz­er.

Edit­ing the Foot­er Text Manually

What if your theme doesn’t have the option to edit the foot­er text using the customizer? 

In this case, you need to edit the footer.php file. It is a tem­plate file stored in your Word­Press theme fold­er and is respon­si­ble for dis­play­ing the foot­er area for that par­tic­u­lar theme. 

The eas­i­est way to edit this is by using an FTP client to con­nect with your Word­Press host­ing.

First, down­load the /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/footer.php file and then edit it in a text edi­tor.

You will need to find the line in the file with the ‘Pow­ered by Word­Press’ text. This is how it looks in the Twen­ty Twen­ty theme:

<div class="footer-credits">

	<p class="footer-copyright">&copy;
		<?php
		echo date_i18n(
			/* translators: Copyright date format, see https://www.php.net/date */
			_x( 'Y', 'copyright date format', 'twentytwenty' )
		);
		?>
		<a href="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>"><?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></a>
	</p><!-- .footer-copyright -->

	<p class="powered-by-wordpress">
		<a href="<?php echo esc_url( __( 'https://wordpress.org/', 'twentytwenty' ) ); ?>">
			<?php _e( 'Powered by WordPress', 'twentytwenty' ); ?>
		</a>
	</p><!-- .powered-by-wordpress -->

</div><!-- .footer-credits -->

Then, sim­ply delete or change that text, and reu­pload your footer.php file.

Tip: Make a copy of your footer.php file before mak­ing changes. That way, if you acci­den­tal­ly break any­thing, you can eas­i­ly upload the orig­i­nal file again.

For more help, check out our guide on remov­ing the ‘Pow­ered by Word­Press’ foot­er link.

Adding Code to Your WordPress Footer

Some­times, you may need to add code snip­pets to your Word­Press foot­er. This is often done in order to con­nect your site with an exter­nal app. 

For instance, to add a Pin­ter­est but­ton to your site, you need to add Pinterest’s script to your foot­er. You may also see a tuto­r­i­al that asks you to insert your Google Ana­lyt­ics code there.

The eas­i­est way to do this is to install and acti­vate the Insert Head­ers and Foot­ers plu­g­in. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a Word­Press plu­g­in.

Upon acti­va­tion, sim­ply go to Set­tings » Insert Head­ers and Foot­ers in your Word­Press admin. Go ahead and copy and paste your foot­er code into the ‘Scripts in Foot­er’ box:

Don’t for­get to click the Save but­ton before mov­ing on.

For more help, take a look at our guide to adding head­er and foot­er code in Word­Press.

If you’re look­ing to add Google Ana­lyt­ics, then we rec­om­mend you use anoth­er method instead which helps with bet­ter tracking.

We hope this arti­cle helped you learn how to edit the foot­er in Word­Press. You may also want to see our com­par­i­son of the best drag & drop Word­Press page builder plu­g­ins, and our guide on how to cre­ate a cus­tom Word­Press theme with­out writ­ing any code.

If you liked this arti­cle, then please sub­scribe to our YouTube Chan­nel for Word­Press video tuto­ri­als. You can also find us on Twit­ter and Face­book.

The post How to Edit the Foot­er in Word­Press (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBe­gin­ner.