How to Remove Default WordPress Widgets and Clean Up Your Widgets Page

Let’s be honest – nobody uses all the default widgets that come with WordPress out of the box. In fact, there are probably a few default widgets that you would never use. Ever.

Because of this, many of those default widgets just get in the way. And so if you’d like to remove them and clean up your widgets page, there’s an easy way.

If you “unregister” a widget in your functions file, it will not appear on your widgets page. If you’d ever like it to appear again, simply go back into your functions file and remove the code you put in to unregister it.

Below is the code to put into your functions file to remove ALL the default widgets that come with WordPress. You can pick and choose which ones you’d like. If you’d like to keep your text widget, for example, then simply remove the line of code for the text widget:

unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Text');

Place the following in your functions file (Appearance > Editor > Theme Functions – functions.php):

// unregister all widgets
 function unregister_default_widgets() {
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Pages');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Calendar');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Archives');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Links');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Meta');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Search');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Text');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Categories');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Recent_Posts');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Recent_Comments');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_RSS');
     unregister_widget('WP_Widget_Tag_Cloud');
     unregister_widget('WP_Nav_Menu_Widget');
     unregister_widget('Twenty_Eleven_Ephemera_Widget');
 }
 add_action('widgets_init', 'unregister_default_widgets', 11);