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How to Hide Theme Name in WordPress?

For security reasons, it’s always better to hide theme name in WordPress. Although just removing theme name from footer is not enough.

November 18, 2019
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BetterStudio Blog

Most websites use a pre-designed theme, like the Publisher theme for their website. Pre-designed themes come with many features and they can be fully customized.

However, with all of these changes, you still can see the theme name via code or folders. This may not look professional for some businesses.

In addition, most themes (especially nulled themes) have many security weaknesses and hackers can easily gain access to the website by knowing the theme’s name.

In this article, we are going to discuss how to hide the theme name in WordPress.

Table Of Contents

Why Hide WordPress Theme Name?

When your work is finished and you have designed the header, footer and uploaded appealing content, it’s time to publish your website to the public.

Most pre-designed websites write their names in the footer, codes, and folders. In previous articles, we have explained how to remove powered by WordPress from the footer.

By hiding the theme name, you actually increase the security of WordPress. Because no one can find out that you are using this CMS for the website and it decreases the chance of hackers to hack the website as well.

Although, WordPress is known as the best content management system in the world and its core is developed by experts, the commonly installed plugins and themes may have weaknesses and allow hackers to gain access to your website.

To answer the question if removing WordPress from footer is legal or not, we must say it is totally legal. Since this CMS is an open-source and completely free, you can download, install and even modify it.

When you download a theme from the official WordPress website, you also receive its license. Therefore, deleting and renaming the theme is totally fine.

Before making any changes to your website, we highly recommend getting a backup. So, if anything goes wrong you can restore it back to its original state.

How to Hide Theme Name in WordPress with Plugin?

By using the WP Hide & Security Enhancer you can hide core files, login page, file path, and most importantly the theme name from the public eye.

This plugin uses the rewriting URL method and filtering WordPress to modify the changes you wish and won’t make any changes to your files and directory. Everything is done automatically and without the touch of the user.

The WP Hide & Security Enhancer allows you to hide the default URLs as well as blocking them. As a result, people including hackers can’t have access to information regarding your theme.

After installing and configuring the plugin, any server and plugin cache must be deleted to create a new HTML file. If you are using CDN, it is necessary to delete its cache as well.

The WP Hide & Security Enhancer manages the following:

Hide Theme Name in WordPress
  • New theme path.
  • New style file path.
  • Remove description header from style File.
  • New child theme path.
  • New child theme file path.
  • Remove the description header from the child theme file.

How to Manually Hide Theme Name in WordPress?

You can manually hide the theme name in WordPress. Although, it may be risky and you need to be familiar with the WordPress codes.

1. Rename the Folder

  1. Connect to your server’s File Manager with an FTP client or cPanel.
  2. Open wp-content/themes folder.
  3. Rename the theme folder.

After installing WordPress, this is the first thing you need to do. Because once you rename a theme, its configuration will reset.

2. Edit Style.css

  1. Open the theme folder and the style.css file.
  2. You can see the theme name in style.css file. Rename the theme in this file as well.
  3. Save the changes.

3. Re-activate the Theme

Go to WordPress Dashboard > Appearances > Themes and activate your theme with the new name.

After following the steps above, the theme identification tools won’t be able to recognize the name of the activated theme anymore.

Keep in mind, if you are using a child theme, first rename the parent theme then proceed to rename the child theme’s style.css file.

However, renaming the theme disables the auto-updates. Therefore, you must manually update the theme.

To remove the theme name from footer, login to WordPress Dashboard.

From Customization

Removing or renaming the theme name in footer can be achieved directly from the WordPress customization tool.

  1. Go to WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Customize.
  2. Click on Footer then Bottom Bar.
  3. Here you can disable the footer or change it in the edit footer credit.

Using Code

The optimized method to hide the theme name from the footer is by making changes to the footer.php file. This file contains crucial footer information.

The safest method to modify code in WordPress is by using SFTP software like FileZilla which you can use to access the core WordPress files.

Due to security purposes, some hosting providers may have disabled the ability to directly change codes from the WordPress Dashboard.

If you can’t load the customizer in the WordPress Dashboard, it’s because the hosting provider has disabled access. Thus, you need to use an FTP client. Follow the steps below:

1. From the FTP client connect to your website.

2. Go to public_html/wp-content/themes.

3. Open the theme folder.

4. Locate the footer.php file, then copy it in the child theme directory.

5. Open the footer.php file in an editor and search for the footer code. (This depends on which theme you are using)

For example, in the Twenty Sixteen theme:

<div class="site-info">
				<?php
					/**
					 * Fires before the twentysixteen footer text for footer customization.
					 *
					 * @since Twenty Sixteen 1.0
					 */
					do_action( 'twentysixteen_credits' );
				?>
				<span class="site-title"><a href="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>" rel="home"><?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></a></span>
				<a href="<?php echo esc_url( __( 'https://wordpress.org/', 'twentysixteen' ) ); ?>"><?php printf( __( 'Proudly powered by %s', 'twentysixteen' ), 'WordPress' ); ?></a>
			</div><!-- .site-info -->

In the Twenty Seventeen theme:

get_template_part( 'template-parts/footer/site', 'info' );

In the Twenty Nineteen theme:

<?php if ( ! empty( $blog_info ) ) : ?>
    <a class="site-name" href="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>" rel="home"><?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></a>,
<?php endif; ?>
<a href="<?php echo esc_url( __( 'https://wordpress.org/', 'twentynineteen' ) ); ?>" class="imprint">
<?php
    /* translators: %s: WordPress. */
    printf( __( 'Proudly powered by %s.', 'twentynineteen' ), 'WordPress' );
?>
</a>

6. Click on Update File. In this case, the footer will either be deleted or edited.

Keep in mind, before making any changes to the theme, it’s best to create a child theme of the activated theme and edit the child theme instead of the main theme.

So, if there are any issues with the code, you can restore everything back to its original (default) state.