How to Show or Hide Widgets on Specific Pages in WordPress

Learn how to Show or Hide Widgets on Specific Pages in WordPress. There are situations when you like to show or hide widgets on specific posts, pages, archives etc. In this article, I will share how you can easily control widgets visibility on specific pages in WordPress. Should you hide widgets on specific pages? Is there any benefit of doing that? Or let me rephrase it, what can you achieve when you show or hide widgets on certain pages in WordPress.

We all use widgets in WordPress for various purposes. In fact, many modern WordPress themes are based on widgetize static home page like Genesis Themes and other landing pages with widgetized sections throughout the layout. The point is, widgets are quite common in WordPress.

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Consider a scenario in which you want to show or hide a widget on some specific pages. For example, you don’t want to display widgets of home page on the single post, or vice-versa. There may be such other situations in which you might want to display widgets on specific pages in WordPress.

But as of now, WordPress does not come with a native feature to control widgets’ visibility on specific pages, posts or archives.

So, what is the solution? 

We will talk in a while, how to control widget visibility and how to add a widget to a specific page in WordPress.

Before that, let’s see what could be the possible reasons (or say benefits) of showing or hiding widgets on certain pages in WordPress.

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Should You Show or Hide Widgets on Specific Pages in WordPress?

I am listing a few basic reasons (benefits) why you may consider to hide widgets on some pages. Though you might have your own reasons to show or hide widgets in WordPress.

• Pagespeed: First of all, fewer resources on a web page means more page speed. And everyone loves faster websites.
• Higher Conversion Rate: Relevance is always helpful for a higher conversion rate. Widgets Visibility Control (WVC) is quite useful if you are running a multi-niche website. In that case, you might want to show a widget to the targeted visitors of a specific page. As the content of that widget is more relevant to the visitors of that specific page. Hence, it may help to boost conversion rates. (Email Sign-ups, Ad conversion etc.)
• User Experience & Design: Sometimes a widget does not go right with the design of a webpage. Or let me put this way that you might want to hide the widget to create a distraction-free page or content.

Show or Hide Widgets on Specific Pages, Posts or Archive in WordPress

You can use WordPress plugins to Show or Hide Widgets on Specific Pages in WordPress. The use of these plugins is an easy and reliable method to do the trick.

#1 Widget Logic

We have used this plugin on different WordPress sites to display widgets on specific pages. All you need is to install and activate the plugin. Once you do that it will add widgets visibility control to every widget.

You can control widget visibility by two methods. Either you can use WordPress Conditional Tags in Text Field. Or you can use pre-defined drop menu schemes generated by the plugin to show or hide widgets on specific pages in WordPress.

#2 Widget Options

Widget Options is another popular plugin to show or hide widgets on specific pages in WordPress. It offers several features for widget visibility control. This plugin adds options below every widget to show or hide widget on specific pages.

Widget Options not only enables widget visibility control options but it also offers widget appearance options. Using this plugin you can assign different widget content on different pages, including/excluding mobile screens.

#3 Jetpack by WordPress.com

The next plugin in this sequence is Jetpack by WordPress.com. And it is one of the most popular free plugin available on WordPress Plugin Repository. If you use Jetpack plugin on your website, you can utilize the same plugin to show or hide widgets in WordPress. Once you install and activate Jetpack plugin, it will add widget visibility feature to all the widgets automatically. And you can configure widget visibility from the widget itself.

#4 Other Plugins

There are few other plugins available on WP repository, which you can try to display widgets on specific pages in WordPress: Dynamic Widgets Plugin, Conditional Widgets, and Restrict Widgets (Update: As these two plugins have not been updated from last two years).

Conclusion

Hiding widget on some pages may help you to achieve some basic things like pagespeed, higher conversion rate, and better UX & UI. Hence you should consider utilizing widgets visibility control feature on your WordPress site.

If you’re already using Jetpack plugin for other features offered by the plugin. You may use Jetpack for widgets visibility control. Otherwise, it is not a good idea to use bulky (large in size) multi-features Jetpack plugin only for widgets visibility control. In that case, you may use Widget Logic.

Hope this article is helpful for you to show or hide widgets on specific pages in WordPress. Which plugin do you use to control widget visibility in WordPress? Have a question regarding this topic? Feel free to ask via comments. I will be happy to help.

Cheers!

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