Can You Remove the Footer Credit From a Free Blogger Template?

You installed a free Blogger template, it looks good, and the only thing you dislike is the small line at the bottom that says "Designed by" followed by someone else's site name. So you open the theme editor, delete the link, save, and reload. Your blog now redirects every visitor to the designer's homepage, or a grey box appears saying the credit must not be removed. Some people only notice two days later, when their traffic report shows that every visit lasted under a second.

I get a version of this question almost every week, and the honest answer has two parts: whether you are allowed to remove the credit, and whether the template will let you. They are different questions. A license can permit something that the code still blocks, and the code can let you do something the license forbids.

There are usually two credits in your footer, not one

Before touching anything, figure out which credit you are looking at. Blogger itself adds a "Powered by Blogger" line through a gadget called Attribution, which shows up in Layout as a locked element. That one belongs to Google, it carries no license condition for you, and removing it is fine.

To remove it, open Theme, choose Edit HTML, and search for Attribution1. The widget line has locked='true'. Change that to locked='false', save, then go to Layout, where the gadget now has an edit icon and a Remove button. I have done this on more than thirty blogs without a single side effect.

The second credit is the designer's. It usually sits in a separate div near the closing body tag, with a link to the template shop and often a line like "Distributed by" pointing to a second site. This is the one that comes with conditions.

What the license on a free template usually says

Open the zip file you downloaded before you open the XML. Most free template packages include a license note in a text file or a comment block at the top of the theme code. In my experience the two most common terms are a Creative Commons Attribution license, usually version 3.0 or 4.0, or a custom note along the lines of "free for personal and commercial use as long as the footer credit stays intact."

Creative Commons Attribution requires credit in the manner the creator specifies, as long as that manner is reasonable. If the designer specifies a visible footer link, that is what the license asks of you. A custom note is even simpler to read: removing the credit means you are no longer using the template under the terms it was given to you, which in plain terms means you have no license for it at all.

A smaller number of templates ship under MIT, CC0 or a plain "do whatever you like" note. Those you can strip freely. They are rarer than people assume, which is part of why I check the license before I check the design.

If you never found a license file, that tells you something too. Templates passed around on file sharing pages with the credit already stripped are frequently the same ones that carry injected scripts, a problem covered in more detail in where to find templates that are not malware.

Why hiding it with CSS rarely works

The popular workaround is to leave the link in the code and hide it with display:none or by setting the text color to match the background. Plenty of forum threads still recommend this. It worked around 2014. It mostly does not now.

Many template shops add a small script that runs when the page loads. It checks whether an element with a specific id exists, whether it is visible, and whether its link points to the expected address. If any check fails, the script sends the browser to the designer's site with window.location. The script is often compressed or encoded so it reads as a long string of random characters, and it may be tucked inside a widget that looks unrelated, such as the one that handles the menu or the related posts slider.

I once spent most of an evening deleting what I believed was the credit check, only to find a second copy inside the JavaScript for the mobile menu. The redirect came back as soon as the menu loaded on a phone. Pulling that sort of code apart is possible, but you are working against someone who wrote it specifically to resist you, and every template update puts it back.

If a template needs a hidden script to protect its credit, the designer has already told you how they feel about removal.

How to check a template before you commit to it

A few minutes of reading before installation saves the redirect surprise. Back up your current theme first, following the list in what to save before changing a Blogger theme, then open the new template's XML in a plain text editor and look for these things:

• Search for the designer's domain name. Count how many times it appears. One mention in the footer is normal; five or six scattered through scripts suggests a credit check.
• Search for eval(, atob( and window.location. These are not proof of anything on their own, but in a free template they deserve a closer look.
• Look for any long block of characters with no spaces, often several hundred characters wide. Readable code has spaces and line breaks.
• Read the comment block at the top of the file for the license name and a version number.

If the template has a credit check and you know you will want the footer clean, skip it now. Picking a different design takes ten minutes. Finding out after six months of posts takes much longer to undo.

The three clean ways to end up with a footer you like

The first is to keep the credit and make it quieter. Credit conditions almost never specify size or color, so a line of 12 pixel grey text at the very bottom, under your own copyright notice, meets the terms and barely registers to readers. I do this on my own test blogs. Most visitors never scroll that far anyway.

The second is to pay for removal. Many shops that offer free templates sell a version without the credit or a credit removal license, usually somewhere between $9 and $29 in the listings I have seen this year. If you plan to keep the blog for years, that is cheaper than one afternoon of debugging.

The third is to choose a template whose license already allows removal. This narrows your options, but it is the only route with no strings, and it is the reason I keep a short list of permissively licensed themes for clients who care about a clean footer.

What I would not do is strip the credit, defeat the script and hope nobody notices. Designers do search for their own template code, and a takedown notice to your host is a worse result than a line of small grey text.

Something to do before your next theme change

Open the theme you are using right now in Edit HTML and search for the designer's domain. Note how many times it appears and whether any of those mentions sit inside a script. Then find the license note in the original download, or on the page you got the template from, and save a copy of it next to your theme backup. If you ever want to change the footer, you will already know which of the three routes applies to you. More vetted downloads and license notes sit in our free resources section.