How to Hide Unnecessary Menu Items From WordPress Admin
March 27. 2022
If your WordPress admin area seems cluttered, it might be time to clean it up and make it more user-friendly. Customizing the admin area is a great way to help your users, authors, or clients easily find what they need and use. To help you do this, in this article we’ll explain why and how to hide unnecessary menu items from WordPress admin. If it seems too complicated or it’s something you don’t have time to do, don’t worry as there are still ways to do this. How? Get in touch with professionals and get expert care for your WordPress website. Neccessary or unnecessary, leave them to worry about menu items, and dedicate your time to other aspects of your business.
Why should you hide unnecessary menu items from WordPress admin?
Take a good look at your WordPress admin area. Now check how many menus, submenus, options, and plugins settings are available for you to use anytime. There’s probably a lot, right? Now really think about how many of them do you use on a daily basis. If we’re not wrong, the number has significantly dropped.
This is a good sign that it’s time to declutter the admin area. In case you have a multi-author website or even have clients accessing it, decluttering this area is that much more important.
The best part about customizing the admin area is that you can fully adjust it to specific users. So depending on what type of work they do in WordPress, you can allow or limit their access to different settings. By creating user roles in WordPress, you’ll also add a security layer as you’ll prevent potential issues from occurring. Just imagine someone accidentally deleting a new blog post or disabling an important plugin. User roles help you prevent this.
Ways to hide unnecessary menu items from WordPress admin
Given that a cluttered WordPress admin area can be a real distraction for your users, it’s important to keep it neat and adjusted to users depending on their work requirements. If it’s needed, you can even disable the admin bar for specific users and give them access only to a couple of settings.
As always, the simplest way to declutter your admin space is to use a plugin. So further in this article, we’ll explain how to hide unnecessary menu items from WordPress admin:
- By using the Admin Menu Editor plugin
- By using the Adminimize plugin
Use the Admin Menu Editor plugin
The simplest way to hide unnecessary items from your admin space is to use the Admin Menu Editor, a free WordPress plugin. You can use this plugin to change the menu titles, URLs, icons, and so much more. Most importantly, you can use it to hide menu items from your WordPress admin as well as set user role permissions, and drag and drop menu items to organize your admin space.
How to use the Admin Menu Editor?
This plugin is very simple to use. After installing and activating it, simply go to Settings and click on “Menu Editor” from your WordPress dashboard. There, under the “Admin Menu” tab, you’ll be able to see all of your menu and submenu items. To rearrange their order, you can simply drag and drop the items. You can even remove them or add new ones.
To see more menu item options, simply click on the downwards arrow that’s located next to each menu item. You’ll be able to rename the menu title, edit the URL, change the target page, and much more. Among those settings, you’ll probably notice the “Extra capability” dropdown menu. By clicking on it, you’ll be able to hide menu items for specific users by choosing user roles that can see that specific menu item.
Once you’re finished with making the changes, don’t forget to click on “Save”. In case anyone without permission ties to access the hidden menu item by typing the URL, they’ll get an error message. The message will advise they don’t have sufficient permissions.
And that’s it! As you can see, Admin Menu Editor makes customizing your admin space pretty simple and straightforward. However, you can always have this done as a part of personalized support for your WordPress website.
Use the Adminimize plugin
Another WordPress plugin you can use to customize the admin space is the Adminimize plugin. You can use it to modify the administration backend and assign user role permissions as well as to activate or deactivate every area of your menu and submenu.
After you’ve installed and activated this plugin, it’s time to hide unnecessary items. Go to Settings and click on “Adminimize” and you’ll access a mini menu. This menu separates the settings page into several sections all dedicated to different WordPress admin screens. By clicking on each link in the mini menu, you’ll be able to see all available options. You’ll probably find many you want to hide or disable for specific user roles. You can do this by simply checking the box next to the specific menu item.
Once you’ve decided what to hide and from who, simply click on “Update Options” and you’re all done. To see the changes, make sure to open the admin page in a new browser tab. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see them instantly in the mini menu.
The bottom line
As you can see, both ways to hide unnecessary menu items from WordPress admin are pretty simple. Even if you’re a beginner, we’re sure you’ll get a hang of it quickly. Or if this is something you don’t want to deal with, simply reach out to professionals from the WP Full Care team and they’ll handle everything for you.