Automatically Update Your WordPress Blog’s Copyright Year

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On the majority of the websites, you will see a copyright sign along with a year displayed in the site's footer. This text is usually added manually, and often no longer checked. It would not be nice that this was automatically adjusted annually. Fortunately, there is a solution to this.

We deal with two ways to do this.

For "Genesis Framework" users

Genesis Framework users have it easy you can use the shortcode [footer_copyright] anywhere on your site. In addition, there are a number of additional parameters to further adjust. For example, the "year" parameter allows you to add a string between the copyright symbol and the year.

Here is an example:

[footer_copyright first = "2005"]

The output will then be © 2005-2015.

For all WordPress users

Unfortunately, the shortcode [footer_copyright] is only available for Genesis Framework users. Fortunately, there is a plugin available for non-Genesis users.

For example, there is the  Current Year and Copyright Shortcodes plugin. This Plugin is available free of charge on the WordPress Plugin Repository. Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you can enter the shortcode:

use to display the copyright icon. Additionally, if you want to add a variety of years to the copyright icon, you can do that as follows:

2005 - [y]

On the Website, you will see © 2005-2015. Please note that the shortcode [y] is the current year and will be updated automatically each year.

Whether you use the Genesis shortcode or the plugin shortcode, please note that by default, WordPress will perform the shortcode on messages and pages. To use the shortcode on any widget, I refer to our manual: How to enable the Shortcode on a WordPress widget.

We hope this guide will help you to automatically update copyright years in WordPress.