At the very bottom of your site, under your address and opening hours, sits a line you never wrote: “Proudly powered by WordPress”, or the theme’s name with a link to the company that made it. It is not doing any harm, exactly. It just makes the site look unfinished, and it sends the occasional curious visitor off to someone else’s website.
You can remove Powered by WordPress from the footer on almost any site, and you can do it properly without touching code in most cases. The right method depends on where the credit comes from, so start with the easiest route below and stop as soon as one works. The quick CSS trick you may have seen elsewhere is a poor substitute, for reasons that come further down.
Are you allowed to remove Powered by WordPress?
For WordPress itself, yes. WordPress is released under the GPL, a licence that lets you use and change the software freely, and nothing in it asks you to advertise WordPress on your site. The credit line is added by your theme, not by WordPress, and where you change it depends on the kind of theme you have. Our header and footer overview explains how to tell.
Themes are a little different, and we come back to them below. For the free default themes and the large majority of themes from the WordPress.org directory, removing or changing the footer credit is entirely fine.
Step 1: look for a setting first
Many themes expect you to change the credit and give you a box for it. Check here before anything else.
- Go to Appearance → Customize.
- Open the section for the footer. It may be called Footer, Footer Bar, Copyright, Bottom Bar or Footer Builder.
- Look for a text field holding the credit, or an element called Copyright or Credits. Edit the text or clear it.
- Press Publish.
Some themes keep this option for their paid version only, or tuck it inside a separate theme options page under Appearance or in its own menu item. If you are not sure which theme you have, our theme detector will name it, and the theme’s documentation will usually answer the question in a sentence.
Step 2: in a block theme, delete the paragraph
Block themes make this easy. The credit is just a Paragraph block in the footer template part.
- Go to Appearance → Editor and open the footer, either from Patterns or by selecting the footer at the bottom of a template.
- Click the credit text. You will see it is an ordinary Paragraph block, often with a link inside.
- Replace the text with your own, such as “© Your Business Name”, or delete the block entirely.
- Save.
Your change is stored in the database, so theme updates leave it alone. If the theme has more than one footer design, check whether your other templates use a different one with its own credit.
While you are in there, it is a good moment to review the rest of the footer. Our post on editing the footer in WordPress covers columns, contact details and keeping the copyright year current.
Step 3: a classic theme with no setting
Older classic themes, including the earlier default themes such as Twenty Twenty-One, print the credit straight from a template file, usually footer.php. There is no box to change it. You have two honest options.
Use a child theme
A child theme is a small theme that sits on top of yours and overrides only the files you choose. You copy footer.php from the parent theme into the child theme, remove the credit from the copy, and WordPress uses the child’s version. When the parent theme updates, your change stays.
The catch is that your copy of footer.php does not receive improvements the theme’s author makes to that file later. Compare the two after major theme updates. If a child theme is new to you, read our explainer on when you need a WordPress child theme before you start, and do the work on a staging copy or after a fresh backup.
Use the theme’s hook, if it has one
Some themes print the credit through a hook or filter, which means a short code snippet can replace it without copying any template file. The theme’s documentation or support forum will say if this exists. Add the snippet with a plugin such as Code Snippets rather than pasting it into the theme’s functions.php, where the next update would wipe it.
What you should not do is edit footer.php in the parent theme directly. It works until the next update, then the credit quietly returns, and nobody remembers why.
Why hiding footer credits with CSS is the wrong fix
A common tip is to add a line of CSS such as “display: none” to the credit. Visitors stop seeing it, so it looks solved. It is not a great fix, for three reasons.
- The text and link are still in the page. Anyone reading the source, including search engines, still sees them. Google’s spam policies list hidden text and links among the practices to avoid. A hidden theme credit is very unlikely to get anyone into trouble, but there is no good reason to leave something in the page that you have deliberately concealed.
- It is fragile. The CSS targets a class name chosen by the theme’s author. Rename the class in an update and the credit reappears.
- It hides the wrong thing. A broad rule written to hide the credit can also hide your own copyright line or a footer menu if they share the same container.
If CSS is genuinely the only option on a theme you cannot change, it will do as a stopgap. Treat it as temporary, and note it somewhere so the next person knows it is there.
Premium themes and their licences
Paid themes are where you should read the small print. Most WordPress themes are licensed under the GPL, at least for their PHP code, which allows you to change them. Some premium themes split the licence, with the code under the GPL and the design files, images or styles under the seller’s own terms. Some sellers also ask, in their terms, that a credit stays unless you buy a version or option without it.
In practice: look for a licence file in the theme folder or on the seller’s site, read the terms you accepted when you bought it, and check whether the theme has a “remove credits” setting you are already paying for. If the terms ask you to keep the credit, either keep it or switch themes. Breaking the seller’s terms can cost you support and updates, which matter more than one line of text.
“Website by…” credits from your developer
A different kind of credit is the one your web designer added: “Website by Example Studio”, with a link to their site. That is not a theme setting; they typed it in, often in the same place as your copyright line. Before removing it, check your agreement with them. Some contracts mention it, and a quick, polite message costs nothing. If nothing was agreed, it is your site and your call. Small ownership questions like this one come up all through our WordPress owner’s guide.
Frequently asked questions
Does removing the theme credit affect my SEO?
No, not in any way worth worrying about. The credit is one outgoing link to the theme author or to WordPress.org. Removing it does not change how search engines judge your pages. Replacing it with your business name and a clear copyright line is a small tidy-up, not a ranking factor.
Will the credit come back after a theme update?
Not if you changed it through a theme setting, the Site Editor or a child theme, because those changes live outside the theme’s own files. It will come back if someone edited the parent theme’s files directly or hid it with CSS that relies on a class name the update changed.
Can I replace the credit with a link to my own site or another business?
Yes. The footer is yours, so a copyright line with your business name, or a link to a sister company, is fine. Keep it honest and relevant, and avoid stuffing the footer with keyword links to your own pages, which looks spammy to visitors and search engines.
Is there a plugin that removes footer credits?
There are a few, but many simply hide the credit with CSS or only work with particular themes, so check what a plugin actually does before installing it. Adding a plugin for one line of text also gives you one more thing to update. A theme setting, an edit to the footer template part or a child theme is usually cleaner.
Sometimes the credit is buried in a theme that is awkward to change, or the footer needs more work than one line. Our WordPress theme customisation team can set up a child theme and try the change on a copy of the site before it goes live.
Next in this series: How to Change the Logo in WordPress (and Keep It Sharp)
