How to Change the Copyright in WordPress

That footer still says 2019. Or worse, it still says “Proudly powered by WordPress” on a client site you invoiced last month.

Learning how to change copyright in WordPress takes 2 minutes once you know where the text lives. The problem is that it lives in 4 different places depending on your theme.

Block themes store it as a template part. Classic themes hide it in footer.php or a Customizer field. Elementor and Divi ignore both.

This guide covers every method:

• Site Editor and Customizer edits
• footer.php and functions.php filters
• Plugins, page builders, and automatic year updates
• Why the change sometimes fails to show

What Is the Copyright Notice in WordPress

The copyright notice in WordPress is a line of footer text built from three parts: the copyright symbol, a year, and the name of the rights holder. WordPress renders that line from a theme template file or a database option. It carries no legal weight on its own.

Two separate strings sit in most footers, and people confuse them constantly.

• The theme credit: text the theme author wrote, usually “Proudly powered by WordPress” or “Theme by [Author]”
• The site owner copyright: your own line, something like “Copyright 2026 Northgate Coffee Roasters”

Both live in the same footer area. They come from different places in the codebase, which is why one edit fixes one and leaves the other untouched.

The standard notice has 3 components: the symbol (© or the word “Copyright”), the year of first publication, and the legal name of the owner.

Changing the footer text does nothing to your actual copyright. Under the Berne Convention, protection attaches the moment a work is fixed in a tangible form. No footer line, no registration, no notice required.

WPZOOM data from July 2026 puts the total WordPress theme count above 30,000, with nearly 14,000 free themes in the WordPress.org directory and more than 12,000 paid themes on ThemeForest.

Thirty thousand themes means thirty thousand possible ways of printing that one line. Which is exactly why the generic tutorials fail so often.

Where WordPress Stores the Copyright Text

WordPress stores the copyright text in one of 4 places: a wptemplatepart database row for block themes, the thememods{theme} option row for Customizer settings, a hardcoded string inside footer.php, or a page builder template saved as a custom post. The storage location decides which method works.

Commercial themes complicate this further. Astra, GeneratePress, Kadence, and OceanWP each register their own footer builder options rather than relying on core.

Elementor and Divi go further still. Once a builder footer is assigned, the theme footer stops rendering entirely and every theme-level edit becomes invisible.

April 2026 HTTP Archive data compiled by GravityKit shows Elementor on 32.67% of WordPress sites, the native block editor on 20.62%, wpBakery on 8.52%, and Divi on 5.72%. Roughly a third of all sites, then, will not respond to a footer.php edit at all.

How to Identify a Block Theme vs a Classic Theme

Open wp-content/themes/{active-theme}/ and look for two markers.

• A templates/ directory containing .html files signals a block theme
• A theme.json file at the theme root confirms it
• A footer.php file with no templates/ folder means classic

Faster check: if Appearance > Editor exists in your admin menu, you have a block theme. The distinction between template files and the theme that contains them matters here, because block themes replaced PHP templates with HTML markup stored in the database after first edit.

How to Change the Copyright in the Site Editor

Change the copyright in a block theme through Appearance > Editor > Patterns > Footer, then click the paragraph block holding the credit line and type over it. Hit Save. WordPress writes the modified template part to the database as a wptemplatepart post, leaving the theme files untouched.

This is the default path for every site running Twenty Twenty-Two, Twenty Twenty-Three, Twenty Twenty-Four, or Twenty Twenty-Five.

Steps in order:

• Appearance > Editor
• Patterns (older builds label this “Template Parts”)
• Select Footer
• Click the credit paragraph, edit the text
• Save

The Site Title block sits next to the credit in most default footers. Leave it alone unless you want the site name to disappear from the footer too.

Block editor adoption reached roughly 60% of WordPress users in 2025, up from 37% in 2020, and Full Site Editing usage grew 145% across 2025 alone according to Vapvarun’s ecosystem analysis.

WebTNG counted 1,180 block themes with 2,755,200 active installs in the WordPress.org directory as of January 2025. Site Editor competence is no longer optional if you work on client sites, and enabling the block editor rather than the classic one is the first dependency.

Made a mess of it? Open the template part’s options menu and choose Clear Customizations. WordPress deletes the database row and falls back to the theme’s original file.

How to Change the Copyright in the Customizer

Classic themes expose the copyright as a Customizer setting under Appearance > Customize > Footer. Commercial themes rename this to Footer Builder or Footer Bar. The value saves to the thememods{theme} option row, which means switching themes wipes it.

Astra: Customize > Footer Builder > Copyright, with [copyright] and [currentyear] shortcodes supported inside the field

GeneratePress: Customize > Layout > Footer > Copyright, which accepts raw HTML

OceanWP: Customize > Footer Bottom > Copyright Text

Kadence: Customize > Footer > Bottom Row, editing the HTML element

Astra holds over 1 million active installations on WordPress.org with 6,000-plus five-star reviews, and GeneratePress sits above 500,000. Between them, that covers a large slice of the classic-theme world, which is why these two paths solve most support tickets.

Most Customizer copyright fields accept basic HTML: <a>, <span>, <strong>. Script tags get stripped.

Block themes hide the Customizer from the menu, but the screen still loads at /wp-admin/customize.php if a plugin registered settings there. Hunting for a control you cannot find is common enough that tracking down where theme options actually live deserves its own detour.

While you are in Site Identity, the default tagline sits in the same panel. Plenty of live sites still broadcast the “Just another WordPress site” placeholder years after launch.

How to Change the Copyright by Editing footer.php

Edit footer.php only after creating a child theme. Copy the parent’s footer.php into the child theme folder, find the credit markup inside the .site-info or .footer-credits container, and rewrite the string. WordPress loads the child file instead of the parent’s.

Skip the child theme and the next update overwrites your work. Completely.

That single failure accounts for an enormous share of “my footer reverted” complaints. The parent theme folder is disposable by design, which is the same reasoning behind never touching core files. Worth reading up on when editing core WordPress files is defensible before you go further.

Creating the Child Theme Files

A child theme needs 2 files: style.css with a header block, and functions.php to enqueue the parent stylesheet.

The style.css header requires a Theme Name line and a Template line pointing at the parent folder name. Case-sensitive. Get the folder name wrong and WordPress refuses to activate the child.

File placement: wp-content/themes/yourtheme-child/

Locating the Credit Markup Inside footer.php

Search the file for “Proudly”, “powered”, “credit”, or the copyright entity ©. The credit almost always sits in the last 20 lines before the closing </footer> tag.

Replace the text, keep the surrounding markup intact, and wrap any dynamic value in eschtml().

Three ways in: SFTP through FileZilla, the cPanel File Manager, or Appearance > Theme File Editor inside the dashboard. That last menu item vanishes on some hosts and managed platforms, and a missing theme editor usually traces back to a DISALLOWFILEEDIT constant in wp-config.php.

How to Change the Copyright With a functions.php Filter

A filter changes the footer output without duplicating any template file. Hook into the theme’s own filter, return your string, and drop the snippet into the child theme’s functions.php or a site-specific plugin. Three lines of code replace an entire copied template.

Actions need removeaction() instead, and the priority number must match the original registration exactly. Storefront registers its credit at priority 20, so removeaction('storefrontfooter', 'storefrontcredit', 20) works and the same call without the 20 silently does nothing.

Nothing wastes an afternoon quite like a removeaction() that fails without an error message.

Run the snippet with WPDEBUG set to true in wp-config.php while testing. A missing semicolon here produces a white screen, not a warning, and a PHP syntax error in functions.php locks you out of the dashboard until you fix it over FTP.

The safer habit: paste code into a snippet manager rather than the raw file. Still, editing functions.php properly is a skill worth having, because plenty of theme filters are documented nowhere else.

Elementor’s 2026 developer survey reports that 70% of intermediate WordPress users now prefer snippet plugins over direct functions.php edits, mainly to survive theme updates.

How to Change the Copyright With a Plugin

Plugins handle the copyright change when you have no file access, no child theme, and no documented filter. Three categories cover almost every case: snippet managers that run PHP, string replacers that swap hardcoded text, and footer injectors that append custom HTML.

WPCode passed 3 million active installations on WordPress.org as of July 2026, making it the default choice for snippet storage. Code Snippets, its closest rival, sits above 1 million.

OddJar’s 2026 comparison notes that Code Snippets’ Safe Mode intercepts fatal PHP errors in roughly 95% of syntax-error cases, which is the practical reason to use a snippet manager over the file editor. Broken code disables itself instead of triggering the white screen of death.

Say What? deserves a caveat. It only catches strings passed through () or e(), so a credit line written as plain HTML in the template stays untouched no matter what you type in.

Output-buffering plugins like Remove Footer Credit intercept the entire page before it is sent to the browser. That works, and it adds measurable overhead on every single request.

The bigger risk is fragility. String-replacement plugins match on exact text, so a theme update that rewords its credit by one character breaks the replacement without warning anyone.

How to Change the Copyright in Elementor, Divi, and Other Page Builders

Page builders replace the theme footer with a saved template, so the copyright edit happens inside the builder rather than in WordPress. Elementor Pro handles this through Templates > Theme Builder > Footer. Divi uses Divi > Theme Builder > Global Footer. Theme-level methods stop working once either template is assigned.

Elementor Pro’s Theme Builder is the paid-tier feature, not part of the free plugin. BuiltWith trend data reported by ExclusiveAddons puts Elementor Pro on more than 5.2 million live websites, so the paywall stops fewer people than you would think.

Divi has held between 5.48% and 5.93% of WordPress sites across the past three years, according to GravityKit’s HTTP Archive analysis. Stable, not growing, and still a large enough base that the Theme Builder route stays relevant.

The dynamic year trick: Elementor supports dynamic tags inside the Text Editor widget, so the year updates without any PHP. Divi requires a shortcode or a raw <?php ?> block through a code module.

Display conditions cause the strangest bug in this whole topic. Assign a footer template to “Entire Site” and it looks fine, but leave a second template scoped to a single page and the old footer resurfaces there with the original credit intact.

Colorlib’s 2026 ecosystem report estimates that roughly 60% of WordPress sites now run some page builder, up from 45% in 2022. More sites every year where the Customizer field does nothing at all.

How to Display the Copyright Year Automatically

Display the year automatically with <?php echo wpdate('Y'); ?> inside footer.php, or register a shortcode that returns the same value for use in the Customizer and block editor. The year then rolls over on January 1 without anyone logging in.

Most tutorials still recommend date('Y'). It works, mostly.

date(‘Y’): reads the server timezone, which is UTC on the majority of hosts

wpdate(‘Y’): reads the timezone set in Settings > General

HOSTNEY’s 2026 date-format guide points out the practical consequence: a footer running date('Y') shows the wrong year for several hours every New Year’s Eve when the server sits on UTC and the site does not. Anyone in Auckland or Sydney sees it first.

Sites founded earlier usually want a range. Hardcode the start year and generate only the end: 2019 - <?php echo wpdate('Y'); ?>.

Astra ships a [currentyear] shortcode for its Copyright field, and Kadence offers an equivalent. Both save you registering your own.

An outdated footer year reads as neglect. Blackbird Digital’s trust-signal analysis lists it alongside generic stock photos as one of the first things a skeptical visitor notices before deciding to leave.

Building a Reusable Copyright Shortcode

Register the shortcode with addshortcode() in your child theme’s functions.php or a snippet plugin.

• Callback returns wpdate('Y'), nothing else
• Tag name of your choosing, something like [year]
• Works inside Customizer fields, widgets, and paragraph blocks

The catch: raw PHP typed into a block editor paragraph outputs as plain text. Blocks do not execute PHP, which is exactly why the shortcode wrapper exists.

Is Removing “Proudly Powered by WordPress” Allowed

Removing the WordPress footer credit is allowed. WordPress core ships under the GPLv2 license from the Free Software Foundation, which grants the right to modify and redistribute the software. Themes hosted on WordPress.org inherit that license, so their credit lines carry no attribution requirement.

Nobody is coming for your site over a deleted footer link.

The split license splits by file type, not by feature. PHP falls under the GNU General Public License because it is derivative of WordPress. CSS, images, and bundled fonts sit under Envato’s proprietary terms.

ThemeForest’s own License FAQ answers the question directly: giving the author credit is not mandatory.

Envato’s author documentation adds one detail worth knowing. Once an author opts an item into 100% GPL, that choice cannot be reversed back to a split license.

Automattic maintains the core credit in the default Twenty themes, and the ownership structure behind WordPress explains why the line appears there in the first place rather than in every third-party theme.

A vendor request is not a legal requirement. Some plugin authors tie their footer badge to affiliate revenue or a support term in the purchase agreement, and that contract is the thing to check, not the copyright law.

How to Write a Correct Copyright Line

A correct copyright line contains 4 elements: the symbol or word “Copyright”, the year of first publication, the legal name of the rights holder, and an optional reservation statement. Anything beyond that is decoration.

Example: Copyright © 2018-2026 Fenwick Bakery Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Naming: use the registered business name, not the site title. “Fenwick Bakery Ltd” holds the copyright. “Fresh Bread Daily” is a tagline.

The symbol: write it as the HTML entity © rather than pasting the character. The entity survives database exports, charset mismatches, and every encoding bug that turns a pasted symbol into question marks.

“All Rights Reserved” carries no legal force in Berne Convention countries. The phrase came from the Buenos Aires Convention of 1910, and every party to that treaty had joined Berne by 23 August 2000, which removed the formality requirement entirely.

The Berne Convention now covers 181 of the world’s 195 countries, according to Copyright House. Protection is automatic in all of them.

Keep the phrase anyway if you want. Most legal teams do, purely out of convention.

Linking the footer line to a terms or legal page is worth the two minutes. Internal links from the footer get crawled on every page of the site, which makes the footer the cheapest place to surface a privacy policy.

Keep the entity name consistent across the footer notice, the privacy policy, and the terms page. BrightLocal found that 46% of consumers lose trust in a business after seeing an incorrect address and 45% after an incorrect phone number, and a mismatched company name works the same way.

Why the Copyright Change Does Not Appear on the Front End

The edit saved but the old text still renders for 5 common reasons: page caching, edge caching at the CDN, editing an inactive theme, a page builder footer overriding the theme, or browser cache. Work through them in that order and the problem resolves in under 10 minutes.

Start with the cache. Always.

LiteSpeed Cache passed 7 million active installs and WP Rocket runs on over 3.5 million sites as of 2026, which means most WordPress installations have at least one page cache sitting between your edit and the visitor.

Cloudflare sits in front of 23.4% of all websites per W3Techs’ June 2026 survey, and 82% of sites now use at least one CDN. Purging the plugin cache while the edge still serves the old HTML explains a large share of “I already cleared the cache” reports.

Cache clean and still wrong? Check which theme is actually active. Editing the parent while a child runs, or editing a leftover theme entirely, produces exactly this symptom, and clearing out inactive themes removes the confusion permanently.

Then check the builder. A Divi or Elementor footer assigned to specific templates overrides the theme on those pages only, which is why the change appears on the homepage and nowhere else.

Store the snippet outside the theme if you want the change to survive. A site-specific plugin or WPCode entry keeps the copyright line intact through a theme switch, and running several WordPress sites at once makes that portability worth more than the ten seconds it costs to set up.

Re-check the footer after every major theme update. Filters get renamed, template parts get restructured, and the credit quietly returns.

Made a change you regret? Reverting edits in WordPress works differently for template parts than for post content, since block themes store customizations as database rows you can clear rather than revisions you can roll back.

FAQ on How To Change Copyright In WordPress

Where is the copyright text stored in WordPress?

Four places: a wptemplatepart database row in block themes, the thememods option for Customizer settings, a hardcoded string in footer.php, or a page builder template. Check for a templates folder and theme.json to identify which applies.

How do I remove “Proudly powered by WordPress”?

Block themes: Appearance > Editor > Patterns > Footer, then edit the paragraph block. Classic themes: Appearance > Customize > Footer. If neither path exists, the credit is hardcoded and needs a child theme or a filter.

Can I change the footer copyright without a plugin?

Yes. The Site Editor, the Customizer, and a child theme footer.php edit all work with nothing installed. Plugins become necessary only when you lack file access or the theme exposes no documented filter hook.

Do I need a child theme to edit footer.php?

Yes. Editing the parent theme directly means the next update overwrites your work. A child theme needs two files: style.css with a Template header, and functions.php, where one stray typo triggers a fatal error.

How do I make the copyright year update automatically?

Use wpdate('Y') instead of date('Y') inside footer.php, since wpdate respects the timezone in Settings > General. For Customizer fields and blocks, register a shortcode with addshortcode() returning the same value.

Why does my copyright change not show on the front end?

Page caching, almost always. Purge WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, or LiteSpeed Cache, then purge Cloudflare and hard refresh with Ctrl + Shift + R. Still wrong? You edited an inactive theme, or a builder footer overrides it.

Is removing the theme credit legal?

Yes. WordPress core ships under GPLv2, and themes from WordPress.org inherit that license. ThemeForest’s own License FAQ confirms author credit is not mandatory, though split-licensed themes keep CSS and images under proprietary terms.

How do I change the copyright in Elementor?

Templates > Theme Builder > Footer, then edit the Text Editor widget. Theme Builder is Pro-only. Once a footer template is assigned, Customizer and footer.php edits stop rendering on any page that template covers.

Will my footer edit survive a theme update?

Only if it lives outside the theme. Child theme files and site-specific plugin snippets survive. Customizer values sit in thememods and disappear on a theme switch, and parent theme edits get overwritten on update.

What should the copyright line actually say?

Four elements: the © entity or the word Copyright, the year of first publication, the registered business name, and an optional reservation phrase. “All Rights Reserved” carries no legal force in Berne Convention countries.

Conclusion

Knowing how to change copyright in WordPress comes down to one question: where does the string live? Answer that and the edit takes seconds.

Store the change outside the theme folder. A site-specific plugin or WPCode snippet keeps your footer credit intact when the next theme switch wipes every thememods value.

Then set the year to generate itself. A dynamic year via wpdate` or a registered shortcode removes the one maintenance task nobody remembers in January.

Two habits worth keeping:

• Purge every cache layer before you assume the edit failed
• Re-check the footer after every major theme or builder update

The GPL settles the licensing question, so your theme architecture is the only real constraint left.