When you create a new page in WordPress it automatically shows up in your main navigation menu. Although this is intended default behavior, sometimes you don’t want that to happen. As an example, I regularly create “test” pages for my clients in order to give them a visual interpretation of some functionality or process I’m trying to explain. I absolutely don’t want these test pages in my menu, not only because it would look terrible but also because I don’t want the general public to see these client-specific pages.
Have you ever had the need to create a WordPress page and have it NOT show up in your page navigation menu? At first glance, this seems like a really simple thing to do, and with the menu creation options in WordPress 3.0 it is…well, kind of. I’m going to save the menu creation for another tutorial but I wanted to show you a very quick and easy way to exclude any page you want from your page navigation menus. It’s simple and I use it every day. It’s a plugin named…Exclude Pages from Navigation made available by Simon Wheatley.
Exclude Pages Plugin
This plugin does just what it says in the description…
This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).
Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.)
Let’s have a look. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and install, then activate this plugin. After activation you might expect to see some new options on the left side of your Dashboard, but this plugin is a bit different. This plugin’s settings are where they should be, only on the Pages screen while in Edit Mode. Go ahead and either click Add New under the pages menu or go to any page and go to Edit Mode. Now have a look at the right side of the page. Somewhere there you’ll see a new item named Exclude Pages. It looks like this:
Exclude Pages Setting
If you want to hide or exclude this page from your navigation page menus, simply uncheck this box and either save or update your page. That’s it!
Here’s my page navigation before using the plugin. The page I want to hide is named Page that Should be Hidden:
I want to remove this page
After I’ve unchecked the Include this page in lists of pages option, my page navigation menu now looks like this:
No more page listed:)
Care to watch a quick video?
If you liked this tutorial, please help me spread the word and share on your preferred social network below. Thanks for your help!
Very cool writeup and video Adam. I have been looking for something like this. Thanks for sharing and your dog barking made me chuckle.
Hey there njenney…same guy from the RS group?
Glad to see you here and thanks for the complement. One of my dogs (the one that barked in the video) is very vocal sometimes. I came home yesterday and immediately went to making this video but it was clear that he thought I should be paying attention to him instead…
…we played outside afterward;)
Brilliant and clear plus easy instructions Adam.
I am getting my head around wordpress and starting my own site so this was a great addition to ‘cloak’ a page for a pdf download.
Many thanks
Hi Judith,
You’re quite welcome and it’s my pleasure to help:) Feel free to post a link back to your site here when it’s ready to be viewed if you like. I’m always interested in seeing how other are using WordPress:)
SUPER-easy plug-in! How to Hide a Page Link from Your WordPress Website Page Menu. Excellent tutorial http://bit.ly/hidepage
This is really great information to know. I am using wordpress more like a website than a blog. I was wondering is it possible to hide all of the menu off a one particular page? For instance, when you go to your “hidden” page, what if you do not want people to see the other two menu options?
Thanks for the great info.
Hi Chef;)
Thanks for your comment. My first thought is to make a “page template”, remove the call to the menu within that page template, then apply that page template to the hidden page that you would like to NOT have a menu at all.
Easier said than done, and there are probably other ways to do it. I’ll do a bit of research and get back to you here with what I find out (or just make an entirely new post about it). Thanks for a great question!
p.s. Love you site concept…I’m always a huge fan of people blazing their own trails and making things happen!!! best of luck and I hope to see you on the Food Network someday soon! Is it obvious that I’m a “foodie”?
Glad You like my site! If you do a post about hiding and entire menu, please let me know. I did not create my site but I do not want to run back to my graphic designer every single time I want to make a change. Thanks for responding.
Yes you are a foodie
and I will be uploading some more cooking videos soon. So check back in a week or so.
Thanks again.
Very clear and helpful. Just what I was looking for!
Thanks!
Hi Lisa, you’re very welcome and thanks for commenting. You might also be interested in our main site WP Pro Business.
Hi Adam,
I wanted to hide pages from the navigation menu but show them at the sidebar, is it possible with this plugin or is there another way of doing it?
Appreciate your advice.
Paul
This doesn’t work for me, my wordpress team is twentyten, but, i used another which is even more simple you can you it if this one doesn’t work for you.
you can see my site http://www.whoisanentrepreneur.com , i was able to hide privacy policy, contact me and about us page and the link to them are on the footer
you can downlowd the plogin here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/im8-exclude-pages/
Rejoice!!!
I want to hide the page, but I still want to be able to sent the link to the client to view. When I do this I get a page not found message. What am I doing wrong? Any help you can lend is much appreciated! Thank you!!
Hi Katie, quick question…are you using the Custom Menus option in WordPress to create your menus? If so, there is no reason to hide pages like this (unless you have a widget of theme automatically listing your pages somewhere else).
Regarding the page not found…please double-check that the page is Published and not in Draft mode still.
Depending on your theme and plugins, it could be something else too…just hard to say without seeing what’s going on in the backend of your site.
One more thing, you might also want to try re-saving your Permalinks…