Removing “Powered by WordPress” from the default Twenty Fifteen Theme

With this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to install the Simple Custom CSS plugin and enter CSS to make the “Powered by WordPress” blurb at the bottom of the page vanish!

I saw a short tutorial video today on exactly how to do this, but the author edited the theme directly making changes to the footer.php file of the actual theme. This is not a good practise. The main reason being that whenever the theme is updated, your changes will break and that is because the file that you have edited will be updated with the latest version of itself, and your edits will be lost.

Modifying the theme proper, or worse yet, the core, and you are asking for trouble. There are two main ways to achieve your objective:

  1. Create a child theme. By far, this is the best way (but for demonstration purposes today, a child theme is overkill).
  2. Modifying the CSS through a plugin.

Undoubtedly, the child theme is the best way to go about modifying ANY theme, and this is the preferred way. Your changes will not be lost when the theme is updated, but if you do create a child theme “part” that part will remain yours forever. That is, if the theme author updates the particular element that you’ve created a child for, you won’t see the update (because you’ve built your child on an old page).

But today, we’re going to install a plugin and add the required CSS to the database. For theme specific edits, this is not the best method but if you’re only making one or two small changes, then this is sufficient. If you’re making CSS edits that are NOT theme specific, then this is the perfect solution. An example for non-theme specific is if you wanted to change the font for your site heading, or size of header tags, or you want to create specific <pre> and <code> layouts that you want to keep, regardless of your theme, then this is a good choice. Example, I like green text on a black background for my <code>, it simulates an old green screen terminal and comes out looking like this (never enter this into a terminal):
cd /
rm -rf

By making these changes in the Custom CSS field, you are ensuring that whatever theme you use, the code will always be formatted the way you like.

Let’s get to it:

First we need to install a suitable plugin. For the purpose of this tutorial I found and used Simple Custom CSS.

  1. In your admin panel, click on plugins, add new plugin
  2. search for Simple Custom CSS
  3. install and activate it
  4. go to Appearance > Custom CSS

Within that field you can create whatever CSS you want to load for your blog. CSS loaded in this window is loaded AFTER other CSS for your blog. What that means is your CSS becomes more sticky (unless earlier CSS used the important tag). For the purposes of our demo, in the text area add the following code:

.site-info {
  display: none;
}

You can also insert a little bit of text here as well. You need to be careful about this because you can’t include any PHP or JS. It has to be raw text. You can’t even use HTML tags! This is very basic stuff.

Example: If you want to insert a copyright with your site name, use this code instead:

.site-info a{
  display: none;
}

.site-info:after {
  content: '&copy; 2015 Your Site Name';
}

This isn’t going to work for all themes and you are going to have to dig a little deeper to try and work out how to do it for them. I have created another short video that looks at how to do this with the Responsive theme by CyberChimps and Freedom by ThemeGrill.

You can watch that video here:

note: These are my first video tutorials, don’t be too harsh! :)

 

Join the Conversation

2 Comments

  1. This WORKED!!!!! I am the most code-illiterate person in the world (I literally started making my website in the past 24 hours, never thinking that it was possible before). My world and future had been forever-changed with this simple guide. Thank you.

    1. Considering I haven’t updated this for the Twenty-Sixteen theme, that’s pretty good going. Welcome to the wonderful world of WordPress. Cheers! Dave

Leave a comment