The term Footer usually refers to the bottom section of a web page in the web design terminology. It usually contains information like copyright notices, links to privacy policy, credits, etc. It may also contain code and scripts that a WordPress theme developer would want to include in the page but after loading the rest of the page content.
In WordPress theme development, the footer area of a website is usually defined in the template file footer.php. In some themes, the area may also contain a widgetized area with multiple columns that you can use to add WordPress widgets.
Since the footer generally stays the same across the entire website, the elements in the footer are usually items that are relevant to the site as a whole and not specific to any single section. With the development of HTML5, however, the concept of a “footer” and a “header” have been expanded. Due to HTML5’s method of semantically marking up pages, the “footer” element can now be used not just for the web page as whole, but even within the the various sections of the webpage. This means that some web pages these days may have numerous “headers” and “footers”. Do not let this confuse you though. On WPBeginner when we refer to the “footer” we are referring to bottom section of the webpage that appears consistently across your entire site. Within the WordPress community this is generally how the term footer is used as most WordPress sites have one head section and one footer section.
This post was originally published in the wpbeginner glossary.
