How to Remove “Powered By WordPress” Text from WordPress Footer

When you first get your WordPress site you may notice the “Proudly powered by WordPress” message in the site footer. Luckily WordPress lets us customize every aspect of our site so you can easily remove it.

There are multiple ways to remove the “Proudly powered by WordPress” message on your WordPress site. In this tutorial we’ll go over the simple way using a plugin and an advanced method creating a child theme.

Video Tutorial

How to Remove “Powered By WordPress” with a Plugin

If you’re using one of the default WordPress themes like Twenty Twenty One or Twenty Nineteen the easiest way to remove the “Powered By WordPress” message is to use a plugin.

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This plugin adds a new option in the customizer that allows you to remove the “Proudly Powered by WordPress” message in the footer.

After activating the plugin it will instantly remove the “Powered by WordPress” text in the footer. But if you want to enable it again you can use the new checkbox in the customizer.

How to Remove “Powered By WordPress” Manually with Code

Having the ability to full customize your site is one of the best parts of WordPress. So I will show you how to edit your site’s footer and remove the “Powered by WordPress” message using a child theme.

Note: This part of the guide is more advanced and will require some knowledge of HTML and FTP.

A child theme lets you modify your WordPress site’s code without modifying the theme’s original code. This is a great way to edit your site since it allows you to still update your themes while keeping your modifications.

There are many ways to get a child theme for your site. For example if you’re using GeneratePress you can Google “GeneratePress Child Theme” to quickly find a child theme for your site. The barebones of a child theme are a style.css file and a functions.php file that tell WordPress what their parent theme is.

In our guide we’ll be using a plugin to generate a child theme, this method is great since it’ll work for any theme you’re suing.

Once you install and activate this plugin you’ll have a new option to generate.

The plugin has an option to “create” a child theme. You’ll see this option in your plugin list.

On the child theme generator page you’ll fill in the name and description of your theme. Plus you’ll pick the parent, by default it’ll pick your active theme. Typically just naming your new child theme “Theme Name Child” is best practice.

After you click create new child theme it’ll be placed in your wp-content/themes folder and activated.

This is where knowledge of FTP is required. If you do not know your FTP login information ask your web host. Once we have our FTP information we’ll be logging in using an FTP client (like Cyberduck).

Below you can see we’re logged into our server and viewing wp-content/themes. Here you’ll find your new child theme in your themes folder. For example I made a child theme for Twenty Twenty-One.

Now that we have an active child theme of our parent theme we can now safely make modifications. Since Twenty Twenty-One is our parent theme we’ll be copying the footer.php file from its theme files.

Once we download the footer.php file, we can re-upload it to our child theme. What this will do is tell WordPress to use the footer.php in our child theme. Allowing us to make modifications without modifying the parent theme’s code.

As you can see I have copied the file to our child theme.

Once the file is in your child theme you can modify it. In Cyberduck you can right click and modify the file using your favorite editor (I’ll be using Atom).

Once the file opens you can simply look for part of the file with the message. In Twenty Twenty-One it’s near the bottom and easy to spot.

Now you can easily just erase the message or add any message you’d like here! After modifying footer.php and hitting save Cyberduck will automatically re-upload the file.

As you can see after erasing the powered by section we no longer have the message in our footer.

Just like that you’ve removed the “Powered by WordPress” text from your site’s footer.

If you have any questions or issues let me know in the comments below!