How to remove “Proudly powered by WordPress” in Twenty Sixteen (2016) theme?

Question

How to remove the:

  {site} / Proudly powered by WordPress 

in bottom of generated pages using twentysixteen (2016) theme on version 4.5.2?

Would prefer if this change was not affected by later updates to the theme.

Note, that I could not make the previous answers work, for example through modification of style.css by addition of:

#site-generator {
    display: none;
}

Answer 1

The quick and dirty way would be to either delete the two lines that are 'resposible' for the message, or wrap them by comments / comment-them-out. In your theme folder 'twentysixteen' look for the theme file 'footer.php'

Around line 50 look for the following two lines:

<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>

You can now either delete those two lines or wrap them with comment tags

1) html comment (will still be visible in the source code)

<!--
…
//-->

2) php comment

<?PHP /*
…
*/ ?>

3) css – Since the site info is wrapped by a div (class=site-info) you could also hide that section by adding this to your in your stylesheet style.css

.site-info { display: none; }

The other actually more correct way to do it would be to use a child theme and remove the two lines from your child theme's footer.php

If you don't want to go through the process of building a child theme yourself, here is a bare-bone child theme for Twenty Sixteen you just need to copy (and activate) into your themes directory: Twenty Sixteen Child Theme. You can then copy 'footer.php' into the child theme folder 'twentysixteen-child' and remove the two lines mentioned above.

Answer 2

The best solution to customize a theme is to create a child theme. You can then copy the file footer.php from parent theme to child and edit it by removing the lines that outputs "{site} / Proudly powered by WordPress".

That way you will be sure that any changes made will remain even after updating the parent theme.