← →

Update the Copyright Date on Your Blog or Website

January 21st, 2011 · 6 Comments

What do you think when you visit a website and see “Copyright 2005″? Most people assume that the site is not being maintained and they may quickly click away, in search of more relevant information.

Changing the copyright date on your site each year is a simple but important task. Better yet, with one line of code you can make your WordPress site automatically update with the new year. (It can be a little more complicated in sites that do not use PHP, but I have a suggestion for you, too.)

Copyright notices on my sites use this format:

Copyright &copy {year site established} – {current year} {my name or company name}

Here is how to put this type of copyright notice on your site.

If you are using WordPress or another PHP program for your site, the code is simple:

<p>Copyright © 2007 - <?php echo date("Y"); ?> <a href="http://www.IdeaLady.com">Cathy Stucker</a></p>

Copy and paste the above code into your footer file, changing 2007 to the year your site was established, IdeaLady.com to your blog or website name (I link from this blog to my primary site) and Cathy Stucker to your name. This will add the copyright statement to the footer on every page of your site.

If you are running a site written in HTML, one way to automatically change your copyright date is with Javascript.

<p>Copyright &copy 2007 - <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
var today = new Date()
var year = today.getFullYear()
document.write(year)
</script> <a href="http://www.IdeaLady.com">Cathy Stucker</a></p>

Make the same changes suggested above, then copy and paste this code wherever you want the copyright notice to appear in your site, such as the footer file.

This is a great “set it and forget” solution to keep your site current.

Tags: Blogging

6 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Tweets that mention Update the Copyright Date on Your Blog or Website | Cathy Stucker -- Topsy.com // Jan 22, 2011 at 6:52 am

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by savvymarketers, IdeaLady. IdeaLady said: Update the Copyright Date on Your Blog or Website http://bit.ly/fbrkEW [...]

  • 2 Mark // Feb 1, 2011 at 7:34 pm

    I tried this (HTML version) and the dynamic date does not work.

    It comes up as the below…

    Copyright © 2010 – Budgie Collective

  • 3 Cathy Stucker // Feb 1, 2011 at 10:31 pm

    It may be because you do not have Javascript enabled in your browser. It is displaying the HTML portion, but not the Javascript that sets the current year.

  • 4 Mitch Mitchell // Feb 22, 2011 at 1:04 am

    This was brilliant! I’ve been tired of having to do it all manually. Don’t know why I never searched for it before, but I thank you for the code.

  • 5 Quick Hitters Two | I'm Just Sharing // Dec 8, 2011 at 9:01 am

    [...] every year. I came upon this blog by a lady named Cathy Stucker, who wrote code on this post titled Update The Copyright Date On Your Blog Or Website. The code she has works great, and I’m now using it on all my websites, although I have so [...]

  • 6 Damian Gostomski // Jan 8, 2012 at 1:53 pm

    I’ve written a short snippet which is an improvement over this, as it supports date ranges, so all you enter is the start date, and then it will display it as just that year, or that year to the current one if applicable

    Check it out at http://www.gostomski.co.uk/snippet/better-auto-updating-copyright-date

Leave a Comment