Stuart Neal
Director of Operations at Nextgen Marketing
We have worked with Vitalli and his team for well over a year now and will continue to do so in the future.
Having the confidence in an agency that allowed us to scale up and down development resources, as and when needed, has really made a positive difference to our agency.
Home / Blog / WordPress / How to Edit Footer in WordPress
Welcome, dear agency owners, and today we’ll be talking about editing footer. The common area, where you usually don’t need development skills – just some confidence is your actions to change something, add new menu item, fix the year, address – whatever – we’ll try to cover all situations in this guide and revisit this topic once a new use case appears
In most cases, you should be reading this article if a client of yours asked for some small edits and your devs are busy or you’re just curious if it’s that easy to manage things, as everybody tells you on social media – so let’s see.
In general, the footer is the footer.php file, which is part of every template for most wordpress projects, meaning we’re talking about editing 1 particular file without coding. Just so you know – developers add and do a lot of things is footer, so having any past experience does not guarantee you anything.
WordPress customizer is one of the first website editing features added to WordPress, God knows when. Kind of a visual editor, where developers could add more and more things to edit and that’s the one where we could start. For a lot of themes with page builders it should be the place where footer is edited.
To open customiser In wordpress admin panel – navigate to Appearence-> Customize
As you can see in the screenshot, this website does not have Footer option as a top level thing, but some themes provide big variety of settings, including footer. More likely you’ll be editing widgets
If under wordpress admin sidebar you could find Widgets that are located under Appearance –>Widgets. High chance that footer could also be edited there. Find any widget that is related to the footer, edit it and hit save. After that you could verify the change on the webpage.
If you have full site editor – means you’ll need to navigate to Appearance ->Editor
Then select Patterns
Then Select Footer as your pattern in list view and you’ll be able to edit the footer template
A lot of agencies prefer using ACF plugin to simplify website editing for clients, so Footer is located usually under additional menu item in the admin panel called like:
This is the global options area, and developers could pull the changes from here to any part of the website. Usually you could find header, footer and all other settings here.
Sometimes developers are using shortcuts or the scope does not allow to waste the time, so some strings of code remain as plain HTML and are not editable from admin panel, so you need manually find the footer.php file and a string that looks like normal string and not a PHP function
For example, on this website, we have a WhatsApp chat link on every page and at this point it’s hardcoded. So If the phone number will be changed – I won’t have option to change the link without editing 16th line in footer.php. This is hardcoded element.
Note: agencies and developers often use git to store different versions of the theme and secure the code. Let your dev know that you’ve made the changes on the production – otherwise, the next bulk update will overwrite the code.
There is a variety of page builders and each of them has a unique approach to editing the global elements like Header or Footer. Also, the approach may be hybrid if you also use ACF. Meaning some things are edited as page builder and some as global ACF Fields
To update the footer in elementor you’ll need to be logged in, find the admin bar on any page of your website, hover over “edit” button and you should see the global updates blocks, including header and footer.
In a similar way to Elementor, you’ll need to find the global Editing area or site builder. There you’ll be able to edit footer, header and other templates. Each theme is unique so I’d check theme documentation
The footer, header, and global editing area may sound complicated – agencies often work with 3-rd party code – so it’s impossible to align and know everything, but hope this guide helps. As a developer myself, I never know where and how things are edited. I first tried things from this guide to find the correct area and then if I fail – going to check the files of the project because there you could find a tip where to find the setting.
Maybe this is complicated – but when you succeed – you’re filling good.
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