At the bottom of your site, there’s an incorrect year in the copyright notice, the text “Proudly powered by WordPress,” or contact information for a previous address. You want to change it, so you click around in the dashboard but can’t find anything labeled “footer.” This isn’t your fault: the footer (the bottom section of every page) is the most theme-dependent part of WordPress, and the editing area varies from site to site. In this article, you’ll first find out where to edit your footer, and then what content should go in it.
First: Where is your footer managed?
There are four flavors, and your site has exactly one of them. The quickest way to find out which one: go through this list.
Block Theme (Site Editor). If you see the "Editor" section under "View," that's where you edit the footer. Open the Editor, click on the footer at the bottom of the preview, and edit it just like any other block: click on the text to type, and add blocks using the plus button. Save, and you’re done. The change applies to every page that uses this footer template.
Classic theme with widgets. If you see the "Widgets" section under "Appearance," your footer consists of widget areas: one to four columns where you can place blocks (text, menu, recent posts). Drag and drop or add blocks there, then save. The copyright line at the bottom is often not found in these widgets but in the Customizer: go to Appearance, Customizer, and look for a section called Footer or Byline.
Page builder. If your site was built with Elementor or a similar builder that includes its own theme builder, the footer is a template within that plugin. You can find it in the builder’s menu under “Templates” or “Theme Builder,” and edit it visually there.
Hard-coded into the theme. If you can't find the text in any of the three places listed above, it must be in the footer.php theme file. More on that below, because there are specific rules that apply there.
What Should Be Included in Your Footer
The footer is where visitors scroll to when they’re looking for something they couldn’t find elsewhere. That makes its content predictably important. The standard elements: your contact information (company name, address, phone number, email address, and—for businesses—the Chamber of Commerce registration number), the legal links (privacy policy, cookie policy, terms and conditions), and a compact footer menu with the most important pages. For the privacy policy, a link in the footer is practically the standard location that visitors and regulators expect under the GDPR (the European privacy legislation).
The copyright rule is more of a convention than a requirement, but it looks professional. Here’s a practical tip: have the year update automatically instead of changing it manually every year. In a block-based theme and most page builders, you can do this with a dynamic year element; in a classic theme, a short code snippet takes care of it. An outdated year in the footer is a small sign of neglect that visitors definitely notice.
And what about the text “Proudly powered by WordPress”? You can simply replace it with your own text; there’s no requirement to keep it. In block themes, you just click on it and overwrite it; in classic themes, there’s often an option for this in the Customizer.
What You Should Leave Out of the Footer
Here’s another opinion: the footer isn’t a dumping ground. Things we regularly come across and advise against: long blocks of text “for SEO” (nobody reads them, and search engines don’t value them), dozens of links in five columns (choose the ten most important ones), and widgets that slow down every page, such as social media feeds. A good footer is compact: contact information, legal notices, a short menu, possibly your logo and social media icons. Nothing more.
Changes to footer.php: only through a child theme
If your footer text is hard-coded in the theme file, or if you want to make structural changes to the layout, you’ll need to edit footer.php. Two warnings. Never edit this file directly in the parent theme: the next theme update will overwrite your work. Instead, set up a child theme (a subtheme that protects your customizations), copy footer.php into it, and edit that copy. And because this is a PHP file, a typo could take your site down: make a backup beforehand and keep a copy of the original file. You can read about how to set up that safety net in our A Complete Guide to WordPress Backups and Migration.
At Surver: Our managed plans include daily automatic backups, so even a footer experiment in the code can always be undone. If you’re unsure whether your footer is hard-coded or located somewhere in a setting, our support team is available seven days a week to help you figure it out.
Check the results on every page and on mobile devices
After every footer change: be sure to check at least your homepage, a regular page, and a blog post, because some templates use a different footer. And check the mobile view, where footer columns stack one below the other; a footer that looks neat on a desktop can turn into a long string of text on a phone. That’s the perfect time to assess whether all those columns are really necessary.
The footer is therefore typically a design task that you do right the first time and then, at most, review once a year. If you're still building your site, the footer is covered as a final step in our A Beginner's Guide to Creating a Website with WordPress. And that annual checkup, along with the rest of your maintenance, can be found in our A Complete Guide to WordPress Management.
