A footer on a web page is the bottom part of the page. Generally, the footer contains information or links to information that the user may not necessarily need to read, but needs to be included for legal reasons. This includes things such as the site’s privacy policy, copyright notice, and credits. On WordPress sites, the footer, sometimes contains scripts and coding that the developer needs to include, but wants to load after the other elements on the page.

In WordPress, the footer.php file usually contains the definition of the footer. However, some WordPress themes do turn the footer into an area for widgets. In that case, the footer is usually divided into multiple columns, each of which may contain a WordPress widget.

For most websites, the footer remains the same on all of the pages. This means that anything in the footer generally applies to the entire site, not a section or page of the site. However, following the implementation of HTML5, the idea of the footer has changed. Because HTML5 can semantically mark up pages, developers can now create multiple footers (and headers) for different areas of the site. This provides additional flexibility. However, the basic definition of the footer, for many, is still a static set of information that appears on every page of a website.

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