Easily Hide Menus in WordPress With The Clean WP Admin Menu Plugin

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The WordPress admin menu is fairly easy to navigate out-of-the-box but can become unruly over time. It can get out of control depending on the number of custom post types registered and plugins that add a top-level menu. If you want to hide rarely used menus from the admin menu, check out the Clean WP Admin Menu plugin developed by, Bora Yalçın.

After activating the plugin, browse to the Settings > Clean Admin Menu area in the WordPress backend. This is where you choose which menus to hide. Checking the box next to an item will hide it from view.

WP Clean Admin Menu Settings
WP Clean Admin Menu Settings

If you need to access a hidden menu, click the Toggle Extra link. Here’s an animated GIF provided by Yalçın that shows how it works.

Clean WP Menu in Action
Clean WP Menu in Action

Accessing a menu that’s hidden becomes a two-click process instead of one, but it’s a trade-off users might make in order to achieve a cleaner interface. Menus are hidden globally and are not tied to user accounts.

Yalçın may add the ability to specify whether a menu is hidden globally or per-user in a future update in addition to a “Smart Clean” option. The idea is that if a user hasn’t accessed a menu in a certain amount of time, the plugin will automatically hide it from view.

I tested Clean WP Admin Menu on WordPress 4.5 alpha and it works as expected. This plugin is a proof of concept so if you have any feedback or features you’d like to see added, please provide them in the comments.

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12 Comments


  1. Is it possible to show/hide different menus based on a User Role?

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      2. That’s what would be the selling point for me, or better yet, being able to exempt specific users. This way I could clean it up for a client, but keep everything visible for us.

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    2. Exactly my first thought. I’m not interested in this as it is, but if I could employ it on a user-role basis I would install it in a heartbeat.

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  3. Damm… can’t use it :(
    When I try to activate it appears:
    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘[‘ in /***/wp-content/plugins/clean-wp-admin-menu/admin/class-clean-wp-admin-menu-admin.php on line 224

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    1. I got another feedback about it and I’m releasing a quick for that tomorrow, I used new php array syntax (5.3+) forgetting about php 5.2.
      Of course my ultimate suggestion is to update php to a newer version for a lot of good reason :)

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      2. Thank you! I’ll check it out later :)
        The problem is that I don’t have an own server, neither a VPS, I have a “semi-VPS” server where I have X minimun resources allocated for me, but I can’t set up those things like update php, scripts…
        BTW, any recomendation about cheap/good vps? :P

        Thank you Bora!

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      3. Well, this always ends up with recommending DigitalOcean :) For standart webhosting I generally use VestaCP or Ajenti panels on DigitalOcean (10$ package) for easier management.

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  4. When it supports user roles, it will be a great substitution of the Admin Menu Pro plugin which works but needs a lot of improvements regarding UX/UI.

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