Your website footer still shows an old year: before and after

Scroll to the very bottom of a business website and you usually find a line like "© 2019 All rights reserved". When that year is several years old, a visitor who notices it wonders whether the business is still open, and whether the prices, hours and phone number above it are still right. In a check of 43,077 small-business home pages, 4,338 (10%) showed a copyright year two or more years out of date.

Two ways to fix it

• Type the new year (or a range such as "2009-2026", from the year the site started to now). Five minutes, but it goes stale again next January.
• Let the site print the year, so it never goes stale. Most builders and themes can do this; a hand-built site needs one short line.

Where it lives, by platform

WordPress (block theme): Appearance, Editor, then the footer (under Patterns or Template parts), click the text and change it.
WordPress (classic theme): look first in Appearance, Customize (often a "Footer" or "Copyright" panel), then Appearance, Widgets. If it is in neither, the year is typed into the theme's footer.php; change it in a child theme so a theme update does not undo it. In PHP the current year is <?php echo date('Y'); ?>.
Wix: in the editor scroll to the footer, double-click the text box with the year and edit it, then Publish.
Squarespace: on any page click Edit, hover the footer, click "Edit footer", then edit the text block and Save.
Shopify: most current themes print the year in the footer by themselves; if yours shows an old one, it was typed in. Online Store, Themes, Customize, select the footer and edit that text.
A hand-built site: keep the typed year as a fallback and let the browser replace it:

&copy; 2009-<span id="this-year">2026</span> Rivera Plumbing
<script>document.getElementById("this-year").textContent = new Date().getFullYear();</script>

While you are down there

A stale year is often a sign that nothing near it was checked either. Read the rest of the footer: holiday hours from an old season, a phone number that changed, links to a closed social account, a "Powered by" line for a plugin you removed.

The two footers above are mock-ups of a fictional business built for this demo. The 43,077-site figure comes from our own scan of small-business home pages in 2026 (a "©", "(c)" or "copyright" year, or the last year of such a range, at least two years before the scan, on a page with no script that prints the current year; years before 1995 were counted as founding dates, not stale footers). More before/after examples: all demos.