How to remove Encrypted Footer links from WordPress themes

Most of the WordPress themes that are freely available these days come with encrypted footer links which more often than not point to unrelated and normally excluded domains .

The theme designers get their themes sponsored through the forums and often compromise the authority of the end user’s site in the eyes of search engines. Therefore it is very important to get rid of encrypted footer links.

All these themes are released under the GPL and thus all kinds of modifications are allowed in these themes. If you have read some literature from the designer stating that you cannot remove links, be sure it is just a tactic to fool you. You can even play with the entire WordPress code if you know how to.

To remove Encrypted Footer links from WordPress themes you need not to be an expert programmer, nor would our method consume anymore than 5 minutes of your valuable time.

We have used images to give you an exact method of How to remove Encrypted Footer links from WordPress themes and most probably we would be adding a video to support our literature as well.

Throughout this method of Encrypted Footer links from WordPress themes we are assuming that you have installed the theme on your blog. You can follow these directions prior to uploading the theme as well.

An encrypted footer looks like this. It is generally very hard to decode.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Here are the steps that you need to follow:

First of all you need to navigate to the theme editor on your control panel. It is located under the Design menu. Once you are there follow these steps.

Find the index.php file. Click on it to open it.

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Now you need to find the footer include code. In most of the cases the code would look like this

<?php get_footer(); ?>

and would be at the end of index.php file.

If you are finding it hard to locate use Ctrl +F in your browser and paste the above code there. The browser will do it for you.

Now we need to add two simple codes one on the top and another on the bottom of the footer include code. These codes mean nothing but they will indicate to us the start and the end of the footer. Adding these two codes will not make any difference in the functioning of the theme.

These codes are:

<!--Our dear footer starts here-->

&

<!-- Our dear footer ends here -->

You can write anything you want between <!– and–>

Now our code would look something like this.

<!--Our dear footer starts here-->

<?php get_footer(); ?>

<!--Our dear footer ends here
-->

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Update the index.php file

Now open your site in the browser and view the page source. In most of the browsers you can view the page source by right clicking on the mouse and then selecting view source. In Mozilla the shortcut Ctrl + U works great.

In the source code you have to find the code that you have added at the top of the original code. You can safely scroll all the way down to the bottom to find these codes.

Copy all the code that is between the codes that you have added. This is the actual footer code.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Copy this code and replace the original footer code (encrypted one) with this particular code. Now you can  change the footer the way you like.

Though you can remove all the links using this method, it is our request that you link to the original designer of the theme.

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