Acknowledgify

Because it is how people find out who made a site they like, and how a client's future staff find out who to call. A footer credit reaches visitors. humans.txt and the meta tags reach developers, auditors and audit tools who check who is responsible for a site. All three keep working long after launch, on every site you build.

Most clients expect a modest credit, and you control exactly what appears. The footer link is small, styled to match their site and nofollow. If a client would rather not have a visible link, switch the footer link off and keep humans.txt and the meta tags, which visitors never see. Either way, nothing is hidden: the client can view everything that is published.

Yes, and that is what it is built for. Write your credits using placeholder tokens such as %%SiteTitle%%, export the settings, and import the file on each site. Every site fills in its own name, address and year, with nothing to edit.

The plugin loads no front-end stylesheets or scripts and caches settings within the current blog context. PHP and WordPress API calls still have a cost, so performance depends on your site. The settings screen has one small stylesheet and one small script, loaded only on that screen.

Acknowledgify does not promise ranking improvements. It publishes credits for people and tools that inspect a site. The footer link is qualified with nofollow by default; search engines decide how they use that signal.

Google identifies widely distributed footer links as a potential link-spam pattern. Acknowledgify qualifies its footer credit with nofollow by default; this is not a guarantee of rankings or compliance for every deployment. Developers can change it with the acknowledgify_footer_link_rel filter, for example to sponsored for a paid credit.

• Visitors, who look in the footer to see who built a site.
• Developers and auditors, who look in humans.txt and the page source to see who is responsible for it.
• BuiltWith, which tracks web agencies and identifies a number of them from homepage footer credits.
• Site audit tools. ProspectWP, a site audit tool also made by Made Neat, picks up the acknowledgment meta tags when it audits a site.
• Crawlers generally, including those that feed AI tools, although whether a given tool uses the credits is up to that tool.

BuiltWith decides who it lists, so nobody can guarantee inclusion, but you can give it the clearest signal:

1. Switch on the footer link on every site you build, using Add it automatically so the credit appears in the footer of the homepage.
2. Use exactly the same agency name and website address on every site. Use your brand name as the link text, not keywords.
3. Make your own website clear about what you do, and show the client sites in your portfolio.
4. Submit your agency through BuiltWith's Suggest a Technology form, with your agency name, website and several live client sites that carry the credit.

Yes. Add a credit row, type the role and the name, and add their website if you want to link to them. There is no fixed list of roles, and you can add up to 20 per template.

A plain-text file at the root of a site crediting the people and technologies behind it, in the same spirit as robots.txt but for humans. Acknowledgify serves it from your database rather than writing a file to disk.

Automatic footer placement uses the standard wp_footer hook, which block themes, classic themes, Elementor, Bricks and Divi all fire. If a block theme places the credit outside your footer container, either set Styling to Style it with my own CSS and target .ack-footer-link from your stylesheet, or use the shortcode or PHP function and put it exactly where you want it.

• Automatic. Added to the footer for you.
• Shortcode. Put [acknowledgify_madeby_footer] in a post, page, widget or page builder text block.
• PHP function. Put <?php acknowledgify_display_madeby_footer(); ?> in a child theme template. The function prints the markup; pass false to have it returned instead.

The /humans.txt rule targets that exact path rather than sitemap paths. Test with your own SEO plugin and hosting configuration before release. Acknowledgify never removes or replaces anything another plugin outputs. If your theme or SEO plugin already adds an author meta tag, leave the Author field empty so the page has only one.

It stores what you type on the settings screen, in one WordPress option on your own site. Nothing is sent anywhere. There are no external requests, no analytics and no tracking.

Yes. Every user-facing string uses the acknowledgify text domain, including the comment header inside humans.txt, and WordPress downloads any available translation automatically based on your site language. The plugin ships the translation template only. Community translations live at translate.wordpress.org, which is the best place to contribute because everyone benefits. If you only need it in your own language on your own site, a tool such as Loco Translate will read the template and let you translate locally.

There is no built-in WPML or Polylang integration: Acknowledgify stores one set of credits for the whole site and serves one humans.txt file at one address. If you want the footer credit to differ by language, the acknowledgify_footer_link_text and acknowledgify_footer_link_url filters let you vary the text and the destination.

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