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.
CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGE
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.
Popularity: 48% [?]
December 15th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Thanks for the info it helped! :D
December 17th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Simplicity itself, thanks! Just cleaned up a fabulous theme I found recently.
December 21st, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Muchos Gracias!!!! This is way better than the other uber difficult methods to remove the encryted footer! You are Legends!!!
December 21st, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Thanks So much. I hope you will visit again. :)
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:30 am
I agree with Kirsty, sooo simple, thanks for that
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:45 am
Fantastically awesome. Seriously helpful, thanks. Have used this now for encrypted footer AND sidebar links… the process is identical. Cheers!
January 22nd, 2009 at 8:30 am
Great article! I’m loving your website.
February 15th, 2009 at 4:44 am
yo man i just wanna to say tnx 4 the brief and helpful lesson that you share i tried and and it work for me .
i try many thing but finally i got this one keep working by posting cool things like this
one love!!
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Thank you! This was very useful.
Big kiss for you! (blushing)
March 4th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Hey guys,
I thank you very much for this help. I was going nuts wondering why when I set up a Google search bar on my site and tested it, it was showing results from my theme creators site. Pretty much they were piggy backing off of my seo efforts. I would have been ok with that if they had asked me permission and also linked up to my site.
So much for professionalism.
Thanks again!
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Excellent post!
Very, very, VERY useful :)
Thanks a lot!
April 6th, 2009 at 5:12 am
Thank you for this guide. However I was not able to clear “Felicisimo Magazine Wordpress Theme”..I added recommended text into index file but couldn’t find it when viewing the code.
Any suggestions?
May 9th, 2009 at 6:13 am
Excellent, the theme I am using goes to a dead site, so the developer is out of business .
For Mubera…I did however have to change the custom link on almost every single page for some reason , and then it did show up in the code .
I did replace the authors link,changed it to this page instead, you deserve it , many thanks
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Very good job ! easy to follow…
Big Thanks,
Good Luck
June 13th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Thank you, Thank you, THANK YOU!
You are a Godsend – I am always happy to credit an author for their hard work creating a beautiful theme but I do not appreciate them adding unrelated links in an encrypted footer! Your tutorial worked like a charm and I am amazed, pleased and thankful.
I was just about to give up on using the beautiful theme I found because of the footer! Now it’s customized to match my site AND the author gets credit for his/her amazing work.
God bless you!
Donna
July 7th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
what i did was deleted all the encoded things in footer.php file and put the codes mentioned above in footer.php file and it worked fine. :)
July 10th, 2009 at 8:54 am
you are awesome, thanks!
July 10th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
amazing. so easy. even my cat do it. Thanks a lot
July 17th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I just used the steps you mentioned, and they works great!!!
Thanks Man..
July 18th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
good ! you can also search in source (ctrl+u) the id
<div id=”footer”> and copy the code between <div id=”footer”> and
</html> i try and it’s works good
July 18th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
I’m not quite sure if you could help me, but I have a problem. I logged on my blog today, and a “links” columned identic to my blogroll link appeared on my sidebar, and I didn’t find how to remove it. I took a look at the widget, and no widget for this “links” plugin was found…. Do you have any idea how to remove it? You can see it next to my recent comments on my right sidebar at http://www.BenjaminCip.com Thank you for helping me…
July 30th, 2009 at 12:41 am
Hi,
Thanks for the great tip. I’ve encountered another issue similar to this. A theme Im using has encrypted banner ads in it and I cant find how to remove them. I’ve tried using your method to locate the source but cannot find it. The ads are in new blog posts only.
August 12th, 2009 at 7:06 am
Excellent, simple et efficace ! Merci
August 18th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
thank u very mutch! :))
August 22nd, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Thanks for the awesome guide!
Those of you who can’t get it to work (can’t find the added code in the page source), I imagine you have a page set as your default page so you need to add that <!–Our dear footer starts here–> stuff to your page template as well.
I had the same problem and fixed it by doing that (I had a page as my main page).
September 11th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Thanks buddy for this beautiful tricks.. I thought it gonna be impossible for me to change the footer links..your trick..it helps me a lot :)
September 16th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Awesome article, thanks for the help!
September 21st, 2009 at 11:20 am
thanks a lot , really thanks ,
that was amazing , effective and in two minutes ,
November 4th, 2009 at 11:11 am
If you do not get the source code text after inserting the “<!–Our dear footer starts here–>” in the index.php then open your home.php file and look at the below. you will find “<?php get_footer(); ?>” here too. wrap them and save file. now view source code. you will find it.
December 3rd, 2009 at 5:40 pm
“All these themes are released under the GPL and thus all kinds of modifications are allowed in these themes.”
Not all themes are GPL’d. In which case, you’d be instructing your readers to potentially infringe upon the rights of the theme creator.
December 17th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
I have tried but as weird as it may sound NOTHING changes at all.
December 20th, 2009 at 3:36 am
Thanx very much. I used that trick and it works great.
I obviously didnt delete the designer’s name or url. I merely translated it into my language.
I would like to note, though, that sometimes there are extra scripts/java applets that are loaded inside the footer by external plugins. Those appear in the page source actually inside the “our dear footer starts here”, yet they have to be ommitted since they are loaded everytime automatically by the plugin.
I guess you should explain that Not everything should be copied.
Also, one must pay attention not to delete the /div’s that are within these lines as well.