One of the best things that WordPress has is a whole ecosystem of plugins and themes to modify and customize your website and thus make it unique.
If you like to do things by yourself, surely you have been brave enough to create your WordPress website without any help. But do you really know how to tweak it? I bet your theme has the following: there’s a link in the footer of your website with a text similar to “Powered by WordPress” that redirects you to WordPress.org.
This link has no effect on your website because it is usually placed in the lower part of the footer. But it has probably nothing to do with your website topic and, therefore, you may want to remove it.
Don’t worry about legal or copyright issues if you remove that link. WordPress doesn’t force you to show a promotional link if you don’t want to. WordPress is distributed with a GPL license and, therefore, you are free to modify your site without fear of receiving any complaint for not showing the “Powered by WordPress” link. You are free to hide this link if you wish.
So let’ssee how you can remove or hide the link to WordPress.org included in your website so that your visitors don’t see it anymore.
Hide the “Powered by WordPress” link using CSS rules in WordPress
The first way to make the “Powered by WordPress” link disappear is to hide it by using CSS rules. For this, what you have to do is open the developer console of your web browser. If you right-click on the link, you will see a menu option (Inspect, in Google Chrome, for example) that will allow you to inspect the link.
When you do this you will see a screen similar to the previous screenshot. Here we see that the link «Powered by WordPress» is inside a paragraph tag <p>. In this case, that tag has a special class whose name is powered-by-wordpress. You see it in the class attribute of the <p> tag.
You need to look for the class name of the tag that contains the link, and copy it in order to write a CSS rule like the following:
.the-class-name-of-the-link {display: none; }You can add this CSS rule in your own theme within the style.css file. But if you don’t want to modify the theme, WordPress now includes an additional section in the WordPress customizer to add extra CSS rules.
Go to the Appearance menu and click on Customize. Now the WordPress customizer opens. On the left side, you will find the Additional CSS option that usually appears as the last option. If you select it you can add CSS rules there and see how they affect your website:
As you can see in the screenshot above, we added the rule to hide the elements marked with the powered-by-wordpress class and, as a result, the link has disappeared. If yours doesn’t, make sure you’re using the appropriate CSS rule.
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Hide the link by editing your WordPress theme
Another more radical way to keep your visitors from seeing the link to WordPress.org is to edit your WordPress theme directly and get rid of it completely. To do this, go to the Appearance menu and click on the Theme Editor option.
By default the theme you have active will be selected, but you can change the theme to edit from the drop-down in the upper-right corner. Once the theme to be edited is selected, look for the footer.php file and look for the link in this file (it’s usually there).
As you see in the previous screenshot, within this file we have found the code that renders the link we want to remove. Just delete it and your theme will no longer show the link.
Be careful when doing this because if you delete more than the necessary or leave the footer.php file (or any other PHP file) in an inconsistent state, with code errors, your website will appear broken for your visitors. In addition, some WordPress installations don’t allow the active theme to be edited. If that’s your case, you’ll have to edit it via FTP.
Be that as it may, always remember to have a backup of your theme before doing any changes on it. If things go wrong, you’ll be able to return to an earlier state easily.
One thing to keep in mind if we edit the theme directly is that, when you update the theme in the future, the changes you have made will be lost. For this reason perhaps it is a good time for you to investigate how to create a child theme of your current theme and apply the changes there so that they are not lost when updating.
As you could see, you can hide or delete the “Powered by WordPress” link in several different ways. Or you can even leave it if it doesn’t bother you. If you still have not been able to remove it or have done it differently, do not forget to comment down below explaining your experience in this regard. I’ll be happy to help you 😉
Featured image by Finan Akbar on Unsplash.
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