How to Create an Automatically Updating Wordpress Copyright Date

Most webmasters place a copyright date somewhere on their site, usually in the footer. If you are using WordPress, your theme may already have this built into the footer code. However, it probably isn’t coded to update the year automatically. This can be easily fixed by using one of the built in date codes in WordPress. Just copy and paste the following into your footer somewhere.

&copy; Copyright 2008 – <?php echo date(’Y'); ?> <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?>. All rights reserved.

It will look something like this, as you can see on this site at the bottom of the page:

© Copyright 2008 – 2009 Net Biz Whiz. All rights reserved.

Change the year 2008 to match the year your website first launched. This creates a proper copyright notice by covering the entire period of time from the launch of your site to current. You can also replace <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> with your domain name if that is more appropriate for your website. Now you will never again need to worry about going back through your sites and updating the copyright notices at the beginning of every year.