That smiley face on your WordPress Footer?

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!