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Zinn® Footprint
A smaller WordPress fingerprint, and SEO crawlers denied while search engines are never blocked.
What Zinn® Footprint does
Zinn® Footprint is part of the Footprint-Free deploy footprint. It removes the tell-tale signals that reveal a site runs WordPress and which version, and it denies SEO and backlink crawlers so competitors' tools cannot map the site's outbound link graph. Search engines are never blocked, so the site stays fully indexable.
Why it matters
A network of sites has one weakness that has nothing to do with hosting: it is discoverable. Backlink crawlers exist to map which sites link to which, and a site that answers them hands over the whole graph. Blocking them by hand is where this usually goes wrong — a robots.txt rule is advisory, a plugin-level block is bypassed by anything that ignores PHP, and one careless rule blocks Googlebot and costs the site its rankings. This does it in three layers, with the search-engine test evaluated first so a mis-set toggle cannot deny a search engine.
What is in it
Every measure is an independent toggle
The generator meta tag, the version on asset URLs, discovery links, XML-RPC, pingbacks, login error detail, the X-Powered-By header — each is switched separately, so any one can be turned off if a theme or plugin depends on it.
The version is stripped only where it is the version
The ?ver= query is removed from asset URLs only when it equals the WordPress core version. A theme's own cache-busting version is preserved, so hardening the fingerprint does not start serving stale CSS.
Crawler blocking at the server, before PHP starts
A managed .htaccess or LiteSpeed rewrite rule returns 403 for a blocked crawler's user agent before the request reaches WordPress. It sits between BEGIN and END markers and is written and removed automatically as the block set changes, leaving the rest of the file untouched.
Search engines can never be blocked by accident
The rule tests a negated search-engine condition first, so Googlebot, Bingbot, YandexBot, Baiduspider, Applebot and the rest pass whatever else is switched on. A mis-set toggle cannot cost the site its indexing.
A backstop and an advisory layer behind the server rule
For hosts that ignore .htaccess, WordPress itself returns 403 for a blocked crawler on init. A managed robots.txt block is appended for the crawlers that comply with it. The block set is maintained centrally by the platform rather than per site.
What it looks like
Seven independent measures, each switchable on its own, so one incompatible theme never costs you the other six.
What you are downloading
- Minimum WordPress
- WordPress 6.6
- Minimum PHP
- PHP 8.2
- Tested up to
- WordPress 7.1
- Licence
- GNU General Public License, version 2 or later
- Written by
- Neil Lock — CEO, Zinn Digital® Ltd
What Zinn® Footprint needs
WordPress 6.6 or later and PHP 8.2 or later. Server-level blocking needs Apache or LiteSpeed with .htaccess honoured; without it the application-level backstop still applies.
How you get Zinn® Footprint
Not a download. Zinn® Footprint ships as part of the Footprint-Free hosting line and is installed, configured and kept current for you on every site on that line. It is the line's differentiator and is not distributed separately.
Changelog
1.0.0 — first release: independent fingerprint toggles, core-version-only asset stripping, and three-layer crawler blocking with a search-engine test that is evaluated first.
Updates
On a site we host, these plugins are configured to update themselves: they check with us and WordPress installs the new version for you, with the download verified against its published checksum first. On a WordPress we do not host, there is nothing to configure and nothing phones home — come back to this page when you want the newest version, or watch the plugin's GitHub releases.
Get Zinn® Footprint working on a real site
Every plugin here is free and runs on any WordPress. On a site we host they are installed and kept current for you, so there is nothing to download and nothing to update.