How to: Update your site footer
Most content updates on your website are fairly straightforward— you can navigate to a page, click “edit” in the top toolbar, and make your changes. But what if the content appears on every page of your website?
The “Appearance” category of features in your WordPress dashboard is where you can edit content that appears on more than one page. This includes your website header image, your site navigation, content for the sidebar area of your news posts, and the footer information at the bottom of your site.
The footer information is updated through a WordPress feature called the Customizer. You can find the Customizer as an option within the Appearance category in your dashboard, and there is also a direct link to the Customizer in the top admin toolbar if you are browsing or previewing your website content.
Once you click on the “Customize” feature, the page will reload with a preview of your web page on the right, and available options on the left. The third option, “Site Footer” is where you can set footer options.
There are five footer options available:
- Full Footer: This includes both contact information on the left and the menu you have chosen for your site navigation on the right.
- Menu Only: This option includes only your site navigation as clickable links.
- Address & Contact Only (most popular option): This option, pictured above, will center your contact information with physical address on the left, and email/phone/fax on the right.
- Address & Custom Text: This option must be configured by the Digital Communications team; custom text in a footer is limited to a plain text message, no links or image options are available.
- None (hide): This option hides the site footer altogether, leaving only the global navigation footer.
As mentioned above, the option that displays only the address & contact information is most popular.
The text fields underneath these options contain the address and contact information for your site, and each field is optional— if you leave one blank, it will simply not appear.
One last bit of advice: the “Department Email” field should contain only a single email address, the website will turn this into a clickable link that will not work if multiple addresses are present. If you need to display more than a single email address, we recommend you use a “Contact us” page that gives guidance for who should be contacted for various topics.