Recently I saw a unexpected visitor suddenly appearing on my footer. A unusual guest named smiley, yes really! As I was doing a regular check on browsershots.org to see how my website was displaying in all the main browsers I noticed a random gap after the footer with a small smiley face in the bottom left corner and sure enough I saw it for myself when I checked it out in my internet browser. What was causing the uninivited guest to appear? Read on to find our the cause of this weirdness!
I did a bit of debugging and started looking at my current list of WordPress plugins, at first I thought WP Super Cache was causing the random smiley face to appear but quickly found that not be the case as I'd deactivated the plugin and the random smiley face was still appearing. I also tried viewing the source code but this didn't help either as no reference to the smiley face was found on any line in the footer. So what was causing the problem? Turns out it's the WordPres.com Stats plugin that adds the random smiley face to your footer. The actual reason why this smiley is there is for visual confirmation that the WordPress Stats plugin is actually working, but the smiley can't be removed by directly editting the plugins php file. You can remove it though, by adding this line to your style.css in your WordPress theme:
img#wpstats { display:none; }
Once you have added this line to your style.css of your active WordPress theme the smiley face will take the hint and disappear. Though secretly it is actually still there, just CSS hides it for you and your viewers.
WordPress.com Stats Plugin
Thats how you solve the great mystery of the random smiley face but if you don't have the WordPress.com Stats plugin already then you might want to consider installing it. It is an accurate stats system that is specifically designed for WordPress. Operating in the style of one of the best free website statisitics avaliable today, Google Analytics, the WordPress Stats plugin provides information on daily traffic hits, referrals, exact data on specific wordpress posts and loads more. If you have a WordPress website this is a must have plugin to be installed. You won't be able to find a more accurate WordPress Stats plugin than this plugin!
Click to download the WordPress.com Stats Plugin
Well enjoy you faceless footer, phew now you can get back to blogging with WordPress!
Fire G
July 27th
I thought I showed you how to fix that a year or so ago?
James
July 27th
Nope, I never asked you about this.
Carolyn
July 31st
Thanks! I was wondering what that was and why it was there.
James
July 31st
Ha ha no problem
istanbul kurye
August 24th
James' Blog ยป Seeing a smiley face on your WordPress Footer? great article thank you.
Parke Ladd
October 4th
thanks dude, helped me solve a minor aggravation
Jay
November 18th
Thanks so much!
Raf
December 15th
I actually kinda like the smiley face being there on blogs all around the web. The little fella seems to have its own life, following me around as I read wordpress blogs
John
February 22nd
Just letting everybody know that display:none will prevent stats from loading.
Don't follow the advice given by the OP.
Instead use:
img#wpstats {
height:0;
overflow:hidden;
}
James
March 2nd
Thats strange. I've been using display none on img#wpstats on my blog for ages and this has not affected my WP stats from loading?
Bogcess
March 10th
So this solves my mystery on what that smiley is on some major blogs I see! I will try installing it too.. Thank you!