Remove or Improve – Is It Time to Get Rid of Your WordPress Admin Bar?
Fed up with your WordPress admin bar getting in your way when viewing your site? Need a simple plugin to help you tweak it a little, or if your mind’s set on it, remove it completely? Read on for a roundup of the best.
Your admin bar may be full of useful options, but it can easily get to a point where it’s more of a nuisance than a help. When you’ve made changes to your site, you might want to go straight to the frontend and admire your new masterpiece without the top 32px being taken up by your admin bar.
While plugins are the answers to most WordPress questions, you can check out this tutorial if you’d rather go down the code route to remove or customize your admin bar.
You can also remove your admin bar within the WordPress settings by going to Users > Toolbar.
Just bear in mind that this will only remove the bar from your own account. If you want to have control over the access for all user accounts, you’re better off sticking with a plugin.
In this article, I’ll show you a bunch of great plugins that will let you reposition your admin bar, change the links, take away some of its opacity, or if you’ll never make friends, remove it completely.
Here are your options:
Option 1 – Personalize Your Admin Bar
Branda
We can’t talk about anything to do with WordPress admin and not include our very own Branda. When it comes to the admin toolbar, she certainly has a few tricks up her sleeve.
You can hide the admin bar from different user roles, and even choose to display certain elements of it to guests. You also have the option to hide specific elements from the admin bar, as well as add new ones.
Branda always has to take it one step further… There are tons of icons for you to choose from, and you can even enter custom URLs. This means that you can pack your admin bar full of useful links to streamline and speed up your admin duties.
Using Branda, you can also change your admin bar logo as well as add your own custom CSS to tailor it exactly to your needs.
AG Custom Admin
Now this little plugin is pretty powerful – there isn’t much it can’t do to your WordPress admin.
In regards to your admin bar, you can remove elements such as the logo (which you can change if you’d prefer), the pending updates notification, your site name and the +New block. You can really make your admin bar as minimalist as you’d like, and even go as far as hiding it completely. The ‘howdy’ text as well as the logo link can also be changed.
Whilst most of the customization options are purely practical, you can also change the colors across your entire admin dashboard and bar, as well as add custom CSS and JS if you fancy a few extra tweaks.
Admin Page Spider
It isn’t often that you stumble across a plugin that feels so normal that you can’t believe it’s not actually part of WordPress itself.
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Admin Page Spider falls into this category. Such a simple change to the admin bar allows you to quickly access posts and pages to edit with just one click.
You can select it to display either pages, posts, or both.
This is all you can really do with the free version (you can upgrade to Pro for tons more features) but it adds such a good boost of practicality to your admin bar, that you’ll never look back.
Admin Bar Position
Ever thought that your frontend would look so much better with the admin bar at the bottom?
Make your dreams a reality with this tidy little plugin. All you have to do is install and activate and your admin bar will move straight to its new home at the bottom of your screen – it’s that simple!
Option 2 – Hide Your Admin Bar
Auto Hide Admin Bar
Often the simple plugins are the best – the ones where you can just install, activate, and voila…extra WP functionality!
Auto Hide Admin Bar is one of these plugins – all you have to do is activate it and your admin bar will be neatly tucked away when viewing the frontend of your website. Just hover at the top of your page and it will reappear like magic.
Better Admin Bar
Better Admin Bar is a very practical plugin that helps you have control over exactly how much your admin bar interferes with the rest of your screen.
If you want to remove the bar completely, you can do just that. If you’d prefer to lower the opacity of the bar, only show it to admins, or only show it on hover, just take your pick.
Remove or Improve?
So you’ve seen both options: customize your admin bar and turn it into something useful and practical, or wave goodbye to it – now the choice is yours.
If reading this has inspired you to go in for a complete WordPress admin overhaul, you should probably check out Branda’s other features. She’s the original whitelabeling goddess and will help you completely transform your admin area.
Kirstan Norman Kirstan is a digital marketer from Yorkshire, England... She formerly wrote for the WPMU DEV blog on anything and everything WordPress, and provided copy for other areas of the website and business.