How to Remove “Powered by WordPress” (Updated on June 3, 2020) [PDFif it is not retrievable]
(I have some important excerpts from the post below.)
Am I Allowed to Remove the Message?
People can sometimes be wary of removing the “powered by” message because they think they’re required to include it on their site.
It’s easy to see it in all of the default themes and assume it’s mandatory; that it’s a kind of payment for using WordPress.
This isn’t true. WordPress is distributed under the GPL license, which means you are free to amend and customize the software in any way you need to. That includes removing the “powered by WordPress” message and any other links to the WordPress site, such as the dashboard widgets in the admin screens.
So the quick answer is: yes, you are allowed to remove the message.
How Not to Remove “Powered By WordPress”
Before I show you how to remove the “powered by WordPress” message, let’s start by identifying a method you may have come across that you shouldn’t use.
This method is to hide the footer credits or the colophon by using CSS.
You may have seen guides telling you to simply use display:none for the relevant element in the customizer or in your theme. But there is a good reason why you shouldn’t do this, and that’s because it doesn’t actually remove the credit from your site. It just hides it from people using a normal web browser.
It doesn’t hide the message from search engines: instead, it tells them that you’re adding links to your site and then hiding them. This is suspicious activity, and something done by less-than-scrupulous SEO practitioners. It could adversely impact your search engine rankings.
It also doesn’t hide the message from screen readers being used by people with visual impairments. Meaning they aren’t getting the same experience of your site as other users. Which is bad for accessibility.
So don’t use CSS to hide the footer credit. I’m not even going to show you how it’s done, because you don’t need to know.
How to Remove “Powered By WordPress” with a Plugin
The quickest and simplest way to remove the “powered by WordPress” message can be using a plugin. Let’s take a look at the options available.
Remove Powered by WordPress
The Remove Powered by WordPress plugin does exactly what it says: it removes that message.
Activate the plugin, and it adds a checkbox to the Theme Options screen in the Customizer, which lets you toggle the “powered by WordPress” message on and off.
“powered by WordPress” removed from the footer of the Twenty Nineteen theme
However this only removes the default “powered by WordPress” text: it doesn’t remove any custom message linking to the theme developer, as you can see below in a site with the Storefront theme activated for WooCommerce.
