How to Disable or Hide WordPress Dashboard Widgets?

If you have a WordPress website installed, you might have seen that there are some default widgets on the WordPress dashboard as shown in the screenshot above. The WordPress dashboard is the landing page right after an admin logs in. The default widgets (as of WordPress version 4.8 ) are - "At a glance", "Activity", Quick Draft" and "WordPress events and news". There may also be some other widgets available by default from plugins we installed. In this post, we will see how to disable or disable unnecessary widgets from the WordPress dashboard.


Now, the default widgets may not be much of an issue for many as they are displayed only on the WordPress dashboard and not on the website. But if we are working on a project and we have added some other users (as editors, authors etc), we may want to disable unnecessary widgets from the WordPress dashboard area so that they are not confused with the additional information from these widgets and to keep the WordPress dashboard clean. 

How to Disable or Hide WordPress Dashboard Widgets?

If we search Google how to disable or hide the WordPress dashboard widgets, you might notice results where people have advised using some code to disable or hide the WordPress widgets. But I would not advise that to many, as there are plugins available for the job as it is easier to implement and manageable using plugins. So, let's check out how to disable or hide widgets that are not required in the WordPress dashboard using the plugins below.

WP Admin UI  Customize

If you are looking for a single plugin that does many things then try WP Admin UI  Customize. This is a many-in-one plugin that does a lot of things. Instead of installing many plugins for different things, this single plugin can be used to customize the following:

1. Hide feed links category feeds
2. Hide WordPress Core update notifications
3. Hide Plugin update notifications
4. Hide Theme update notifications
5. Hide Screen Options
6. Hide Help
7. Change footer text "Thank you for creating with WordPress"
8. Hide widget boxes from dashboard (At a glance, Activity, Quick Draft, WordPress Events and News)
9. Edit left menu and right menu items on the admin bar
10. Edit admin sidebar menus
11. Edit meta boxes on post and pages (Categories, tags, featured images, discussion, custom fields, etc.)

Dashboard Commander
If you don't want a plugin that does many things and you want to hide just widgets on the dashboard, try "Dashboard Commander". Dashboard Commander allows hiding dashboard widgets and even widgets added to dashboard by plugins.

Installation:

1. Extract the dashboard-commander folder to your wp-content/plugins directory
2. Activate the plugin through the admin interface
3. 
   

Usage:

1. Visit your dashboard once to build a list of dashboard widgets
2. Go to Settings > Dashboard Commander to configure access to widgets
3. The widgets available on the dashboard would be listed
4. By default, all the widgets are displayed to "nobody"
5. To disable or hide, widget in the WordPress dashboard, leave the access level to "nobody"
6. To enable display for a particular widget, set the access level from the drop-down.
7. Click Save

For example, you might want the "At a glance", "Activity" and "Draft" to be displayed to Authors/Editors. In that case, you may set the access level for these widgets to "publish_role" or "edit_post" etc as desired.

Configuration page of Dashboard Commander 

After saving the "Dashboard Commander" settings, login to WordPress website as another user you want to check, and see that the widgets are hidden.

Before hiding WordPress News and Plugin Widgets:

After hiding WordPress News and Plugin Widgets:

Download the Dashboard Commander WordPress plugin.

If you have done something similar, let me know in the comments which plugin you used or how you managed to hide the default widgets.