The other day I told you that you need to beware of free Wordpress themes with encryption and links in the footer to other sites besides the theme designers site.  I also promised to explain exactly how to remove the encryption, if you do have a theme with encrypted areas in it.

There are two ways to remove encryption from your Wordpress theme.

#1: Find a decoder script online that works for that particular encryption.  This is time consuming and doesn’t always work.

#2: Find out what the encryption stands for and replace it in your theme.

We’re going to talk about option #2 because it’s pretty easy to do.

First step: access your index.php

You need to find the encrypted sections in your theme.  Usually it’s just in the footer.php file but sometimes other files are affected too.  We’re going to assume for this example that we are decrypting an encoded footer.

• If you use FTP, download and open up your index.php in your code editor.
• If you make edits through the Wordpress dashboard, navigate to ‘Appearance’ and ‘Editor’ on the left side.  Then on the right side, select your index.php.

Second step: locate the code that calls the footer

The code that calls the footer usually looks like this:

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Third step: add placeholder text to make it easy to locate the code

Place a line of code above and below the call to the footer so we can easily locate it.  It should now look like this:

<!--Stupid crap starts here-->

<?php get_footer(); ?>

<!--Stupid crap ends here-->

Save your index.php (if using FTP, upload it back to your site).

Fourth step: view source code

In your browser, you need to view the source code of the page and search for the two lines of text we added above “stupid crap starts here” and “stupid crap ends here”.

In Internet Explorer: go to “view” then “source”

In Firefox: go to “view” then “page source”

Fifth step: copy the code between the “stupid crap” statements to your clipboard

The code between the two statements that we added to the index.php that shows in the source code is basically the decrypted version of your footer.php.  So you want to copy all the code between “stupid crap starts here” and “stupid crap ends here”.

Sixth step: overwrite footer.php

Open your footer.php (in FTP or your Wordpress dashboard) and delete the entire contents of it.  Then paste the code you copied from your source code and save it.

Check your site to make sure everything works, and VOILA’ you have successfully decrypted your footer. Now you can easily edit it to your liking.

Don’t forget to go back into your index.php and remove the statements about the “stupid crap”!

Keep in mind that by doing this you may violate the theme designer’s requirements that you agreed to when you downloaded the theme. My recommendation is to not use a theme that has encrypted parts, but if you choose to do so, at least you have the knowledge to be able to ensure there is no malicious code hiding inside it.