Widgets make it extremely easy for beginner level WordPress users to drag and drop items into different widget areas and create unique layouts for their websites. You can even extend the power of default widgets to get better control on your site’s layout by using conditional statements. Most widgets allow you to give them a title. This title then appears in Widgets admin area as well as your website’s front end. The problem is that some times you may not want to display the widget title on your website. One of our users recently asked us how to remove widget title in WordPress? Well in this article, we will show you how to easily hide widget title in WordPress.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
First thing you need to do is install and activate Remove Widget Titles plugin. Upon activation, simply go to Appearance » Widgets. In order to hide the title of a widget, all you have to do is add an exclamation mark before the title of the widget.
Remove widget title plugin will hide widget titles starting with an exclamation mark and display all other widget titles on your website . In the example above, we have hidden widget titles for search and a text widget titled Stats. We have given a title to the recent posts widget and decided to show it on the front end. This is how it looks:
That’s it. It is really this simple to hide widget titles in WordPress. We hope that this article helps you remove widget titles at your convenience. Do you show widget titles or remove them? Let us know in the comments below.
I would urge caution to avoid using plugins for relatively simple edits. Keep in mind that the more dependency you have on plugins the more work it is to manage and troubleshoot when things go wrong.
Additionally, plugins affect the performance of your WP site and adds overhead, so use only when you need to.
If you are looking to hide the widget title you can try this approach by adding the CSS to your theme’s custom CSS or to the .css file found in WP.
Here’s an example, I used in a Divi theme blog:
.et_pb_sidebar_0.et_pb_widget_area .widgettitle {display:none;}
Hope this helps.
Hi Joe,
We have discussed this in our article on How many WordPress plugins should you install on your site.
Good day.
I added ! to all my Widgets.
The writing is now gone, but i am left with “Block” where the writing was.
How do i remove these blocks?
regards
Willie
If you want to remove a title from a specific widget and you don’t want to download a plugin just to do it, add something like this into your themes’ CSS wherever relevant;
.last is obviously optional, relative to what you’re working on – as is ‘custom-header’ (points to the specific widget I was working with). If in doubt, Right Click > Inspect Element.
It only removes the title, but not the styling associated with it. Even thouth the text is no longer there, I can still see the title underline and the spacing that is applied to it. How do I remove this completely?
Doesn’t work for all widgets, such as Google AdSense, still searching for a solution.
Do you know how can i do this manually, without a plugin?
It is not a very neat solution but should work:
function remove_widget_title() { $titleNew = ""; return $titleNew; } add_filter ( 'widget_title', 'remove_widget_title' );I am trying to remove all of my widget titles. The function you suggested did not remove them.
Great post! Additionally, in a related topic, to also hide page and post titles in singular views there is a Hide Title Plugin as well. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hide-title/
Wow! Thank you, Scott, for mentioning this plugin. I’ve been searching for more than a week now for something like this. Thank you.
What is the code? I’m not trying to install an entire plugin just for this.
Yeah! Wishes do come true. Just installed the Remove Widget Titles on 2 sites (running latest WordPress, Thesis 1.8.5 on one and Genesis/Prose on other) and works like a charm. Oh, the power of a single !
Just a little concerned that no updates on this widget since 2011.
Probably doesn’t need to be updated
thanks for this i was in need of such a plugin some years ago..i was tweaking up my site and wanted to hide the title…for some reason it was not hiding for a plugin, then i just edited some code using plugin editor and it stopped showing…this is a very good tool and will make the job of hiding title easy!
Cheers,
Gautam
This is a very useful tip, thanks! Now, is there an easy way to make a widget title into a link? I wish you could just add code into the widget title area, but WordPress doesn’t allow it.
Try using either one of these plugins:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-title-links/screenshots/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/linkable-title-html-and-php-widget/
If you leave the Title area blank it will do this without a plugin.
Yes, but then you don’t know which widget is there because your title area is blank. Specially if you have multiple widgets in that widget area without titles.