How to Remove WordPress Dashboard Widgets

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Is this what you see when you login?

Screenshot of WordPress admin dashboard

If you’re like me, you don’t use most of the stuff on the dashboard. For instance, I never use the Quick Draft widget, and I can do without the WordPress News widget too. Luckily, there’s a way to remove them.

How to Remove Dashboard Widgets

You may not have noticed, but there’s a “Screen Options” tab at the top of most pages in your admin. If you click on it while in your Dashboard, you’ll see a few checkboxes like this:

Screenshot of the Screen Options tab opened in the WordPress admin dashboard

You can uncheck any box, and the corresponding widget will be removed.

Pretty neat, right? In the next 60 seconds, you can clean up your admin dashboard to have only the widgets you want.

Bonus tip: The Screen Options tab shows up on most pages in your admin dashboard. You can use it to remove meta boxes in the Post editor screen, remove metadata from the Post list screen, and even customize the Users page too.

Ben Sibley
Ben Sibley
This article was written by Ben Sibley. He is a WordPress theme designer & developer, and founder of Compete Themes.