Appearance → Widgets → Footer Widgets. Anything you put here sits in a row across the footer, above the copyright line.
With no widgets in it, the area is not printed at all — no empty band, no stray rule.
The only widget area
Stoat is a single-column theme. There is no sidebar and there is no widget area above the footer; this is the one. That is a design decision rather than an omission — a reading column with a column of boxes beside it is a different theme, not a switch on this one.
What to put in it
The footer is where a publication puts the things a reader occasionally needs and never browses for:
- Text or Paragraph — who you are, in two sentences, and how to reach you
- Navigation — a section list, if your footer menu is full
- Categories or Archives — on a site with a deep back catalogue
- RSS, or a newsletter form from your mailing-list plugin
- Social links — Stoat 1.4.1 does not print the social menu in the footer, so a widget is how you get profile links down there
Two to four widgets is the shape that works. One widget in a full-width row looks stranded; six wrap into an unreadable grid on a laptop.
Widget titles
Each widget’s title is printed as a heading, styled by the heading font at a small size. Leave a title empty and none is printed — useful for a plain paragraph of text where a heading would be noise.
Lists inside widgets — pages, categories, archives, a nav menu — mark the item matching the page you are on, so a reader can see where they are.
The block widget editor
WordPress’s widget screen is block-based, so anything that works in a post works in a widget: an Image, a Group with a background, a Query Loop, a Buttons row. If you preferred the old screen, the Classic Widgets plugin restores it and Stoat works with either.