One often overlooked part of website building is creating an effective website footer. It’s the final thing people see when they scroll down, and it also plays an important part in helping people navigate your website.
That’s why understanding how to customize your footer in WordPress is so important. Whether your goal is to simply get rid of the phrase “Proudly Powered by WordPress” or to entirely revamp it, we’ll show you how you can quickly and easily edit your WordPress footer.
Basically, the footer is the area of the website that appears at the bottom of the page. You can usually find it on every page of your website.
A lot of web owners usually don’t pay much attention to this section, but it’s a lot more useful than you’d think. It provides connections to pages that can be helpful to visitors, as well as extra information about you and your website.
Aside from that, the internal links found here also contribute to your site’s SEO (speaking of SEO, you can learn more about the best web hosts and how they can help you boost your rankings in our handy guide to how hosting can affect your SEO).
So, what exactly does a footer consist of? Well, some common elements include:
Below is an example of a website footer.
It doesn’t take a web development expert to create a footer similar to the one above. You can even use tools such as website builders, which make it easier for you thanks to their drag-and-drop functionality.
Going back to the components mentioned above, it’s important to note that you don’t need to use all of them. And, to prevent having a footer that occupies the majority of the webpage, you should only choose the ones that are essential to your website.
The choice of the footer design is entirely up to you and your preferences. Keep in mind, though, that the theme you choose for your WordPress site might have an impact on the layout, formatting, and functions of the footer.
So, let’s look at the various easy ways you can customize your footers:
You can change your website’s design, its header and footer, its titles, and many other common settings using the WordPress Customizer, a feature in your WordPress dashboard. This is the safest and easiest method for editing the footer in WordPress.
Here’s what you gotta do:
And there you have it! You finally edited the footer of your WordPress website.
If you ever decide to change anything in the future, you can simply return to this section and make the necessary changes.
Some of WordPress’ most useful features are widgets, which are great for adding text, videos, photographs, HTML code, and other content to various parts of your website. You can drag and drop these small content blocks.
Here’s how to do it:
That’s it! You have another way to edit your footer.
If you’re not a fan of the methods we mentioned above, you can always use a plugin.
But out of the hundreds (if not thousands) of footer plugins out there, it can be pretty overwhelming to choose. Fear not! You can take a look at our top picks:
For this method, we’ll be using the Elementor Header & Footer Builder plugin and here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use it.
You now have your own customized footer, with 3 ways to do it too!
As mentioned earlier, your WordPress website’s footer can be found on all pages. So you can’t just fill this section with pointless links or the standard WordPress theme text. That’s why you should make use of your website’s footer by emphasizing important links that cannot be featured in the header.
Also, the footer provides an amazing opportunity for you to boost your business image and leave a lasting impact on your visitors. You can include your logo there along with a punchline, or a straightforward explanation of your brand that highlights what your company is about, instead of leaving this place blank or filling it with not so useful information.
Plus, from an SEO standpoint, the site’s footer is also equally important. Any links found in the footer will be treated as site-wide links because they can be found on every page of your website. And, in order to increase page authority, you should never stuff this area with keywords or internal links. Links should only be included if they are necessary or valuable to your audience.
These are simply just a few reasons why you need to tweak the footer of your WordPress website after adding a theme.
Fortunately, the majority of WordPress themes found here have footer editing capabilities built right in, so you don’t need to manually change the code in footer.php. We also don’t advise making changes straight to footer.php because if something goes wrong with the code, footer.php won’t load and your site won’t function.
Overlooking your website’s footer is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, as not having the necessary and useful information can make your web visitors click away and choose your competitors instead.
Luckily, editing your footer on WordPress is very easy to do.
There are three methods you can use to change your footer, and none of them will take more than a few minutes. Those few minutes to edit your footer seems like a great trade for a long-lasting impression!
