In this quick tip I’ll show you how to edit the footer of your WordPress website.
How to Edit the Footer in WordPress
What is the Footer in WordPress?
“The footer” in web design refers to the foot of a web page (surprise!). With WordPress you can edit the content and the layout of that footer, and I’ll demonstrate how that’s possible.
I’m using the Twenty Twenty WordPress theme, which was installed by default when I installed WordPress. What your footer looks like depends greatly on the theme you have installed, but the basic editing principles remain the same.
There are two basic approaches to edit the footer in WordPress, let’s take a look:
1. Edit Footer Using WordPress Theme Editor
Go to the admin dashboard of your website and navigate to Appearance > Theme Editor. In the file tree to the right of the page you’ll be able to find which file is used for the Theme’s Footer (in this case footer.php):
footer.php is a “partial” which is included in pretty much all pages of the website. You can click on it here in order to open up the contents for editing. Make your changes to the code then hit Update File to save.
Note: you need to be careful editing files in this way. This is a PHP file which contains executable code as well as the page markup. You could easily break your website by making a mistake here! Luckily, WordPress does run a check on any code before you save here, so you will get an error message if your code doesn’t work.
How Else Can I Edit footer.php?
You might prefer to edit the footer.php file in your own coding environment, in which case you’ll find it in your WordPress installation wp-content/themes/twentytwenty/footer.php. Make your changes on your own computer, then upload the changed file to your web host via FTP.
2. Use the WordPress Customizer
You might also be able to edit the WordPress footer using the customizer, but this will depend on whether the theme author in your case has allowed for that.
When logged in, go to Appearance > Customize. From there you’ll possibly be given a range of options to customize the contents and layout of the footer, which might look a bit like this:
The advantages to this approach are that you needn’t touch any code and risk breaking the website. The downside is that you’re reliant on whatever options the theme author has built, so there’s less flexibility.
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That’s it for this quick tip, I hope you now have a better understanding of how to edit the footer of your WordPress website. If you’re a beginner WordPress user, check out our other foundation tutorials to get you up to speed:
WordPressHow to Add or Edit a Sidebar With Widgets in WordPress
WordPressHow to Add and Edit Categories in WordPress
WordPressWhat Is a Slug in WordPress?
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