Change the Genesis Theme Copyright Line in Footer for WordPress

Genesis Themes have a footer credit copyright line at the base of the page. This includes the copyright and Genesis framework link with a couple of standard WordPress default links.

To change this, you can add a new function and filter into your functions.php of your Genesis child theme…

Adding the Function

//Changing the Credits
function wpb_footer_creds_text () {
	echo '<div class="creds"><p>Copyright &copy;';
	echo date('Y');
	echo ' &middot; <a href="https://wpbeaches.com/">Neil Gee</a> - All Rights Are Reserved &middot; Powered by<a href="https://wpbeaches.com"> WP Beaches</a></p></div>';
}

Just change the above content to suit your needs. (You can easily use just one echo statement but just separate the PHP and HTML).  In the example above the first echo statement is adding the html mark up and copyright sign, the second echo is using PHP to echo the year which will change as the year does and the third is adding a couple of links and closing HTML mark-up.

As one echo line you can concatenate these and run as:

//Changing the Credits
function wpb_footer_creds_text () {
 echo '<div class="creds"><p>Copyright &copy; ' . date('Y') . ' &middot; <a href="https://wpbeaches.com/">Neil Gee</a> - All Rights Are Reserved &middot; Powered by<a href="https://wpbeaches.com"> WP Beaches</a></p></div>'; }

Name the function something similar to the above and then keep that name in the second half of the filter action declaration below – this example uses the function name wpb_footer_creds_text

Using return instead of echo

With filters it is better practice to return the value instead of echo‘ing it

//Changing the Credits
function wpb_footer_creds_text () {
 $copyright = '<div class="creds"><p>Copyright &copy; ' . date('Y') . ' &middot; <a href="https://wpbeaches.com/">Neil Gee</a> - All Rights Are Reserved &middot; Powered by<a href="https://wpbeaches.com"> WP Beaches</a></p></div>';
return $copyright
 }

So now we are creating a variable $copyright and assigning it the copyright text and then returning it back ready for the filter.

Adding the Filter

add_filter( 'genesis_footer_creds_text', 'wpb_footer_creds_text' );

Add the filter below the function, (you can add it above if that makes more sense to you and above is actually more WordPress standard). Giving us the final piece of code:

//Changing the Credits
function wpb_footer_creds_text () {
 $copyright = '<div class="creds"><p>Copyright &copy; ' . date('Y') . ' &middot; <a href="https://wpbeaches.com/">Neil Gee</a> - All Rights Are Reserved &middot; Powered by<a href="https://wpbeaches.com"> WP Beaches</a></p></div>';
return $copyright
 }
add_filter( 'genesis_footer_creds_text', 'wpb_footer_creds_text' );

There you will have your new Copyright/Credit line

Remove The Genesis Theme Copyright Line

To remove the credit copyright line altogether, you can just return nothing by adding to your functions.php:

function wpb_footer_creds_text () {
	$copyright = '';
        return $copyright;
}
add_filter( 'genesis_footer_creds_text', 'wpb_footer_creds_text' );

Also you may want to check out how to in Genesis add footer content via a widget instead.