Managing a WordPress site with dozens of plugins can quickly become overwhelming. Your plugins list grows cluttered with inactive plugins you might need later, making it difficult to find and manage the ones you’re actively using. But what if you could hide WordPress plugins without permanently deleting them?

That’s exactly what Developry WP Hidden Plugins allows you to do. This lightweight, free WordPress plugin lets you temporarily hide inactive plugins from your plugins list while keeping them safely stored for future use.

Why You Need to Hide WordPress Plugins

Before we dive into how to hide plugins, let’s explore why this functionality matters for WordPress site administrators.

Keep Your Plugins List Clean and Organized

If you’re managing a WordPress site long-term, you’ve probably accumulated plugins for seasonal promotions, one-time events, testing purposes, or backup solutions. Deleting these plugins means losing your configurations and settings. Keeping them active clutters your dashboard and makes plugin management tedious.

Hiding plugins offers the best of both worlds: a clean, organized plugins list with quick access to the tools you use daily, while preserving inactive plugins you might need later.

Test Plugin Conflicts More Efficiently

When troubleshooting WordPress issues, identifying plugin conflicts is often necessary. Instead of deleting and reinstalling plugins repeatedly, you can temporarily hide suspected plugins to isolate the problem. This approach is faster, safer, and preserves all your plugin settings.

Improve WordPress Admin Performance

Every plugin listed in your WordPress admin requires resources to display and manage. While the impact is minimal, hiding unused plugins can contribute to a slightly faster admin experience, especially on sites with 50+ installed plugins.

Maintain Production Site Cleanliness

For production websites, maintaining a professional appearance matters. Hiding development, testing, or backup plugins keeps your plugins list focused on active, essential tools while maintaining access to auxiliary plugins when needed.

How WP Hidden Plugins Works

The plugin uses a simple yet effective approach to hide WordPress plugins without modifying any core files or deleting data.

The Directory Renaming Method

When you hide a plugin, WP Hidden Plugins renames the plugin’s directory by adding a dot prefix. For example:

• Before: /wp-content/plugins/plugin-name/
• After: /wp-content/plugins/.plugin-name/

In Unix-based systems (which most web servers use), files and directories starting with a dot are considered hidden. WordPress doesn’t recognize these directories as plugins, effectively making them invisible without deleting anything.

When you want to restore a plugin, the process reverses—the dot prefix is removed, making the plugin visible to WordPress again.

Safe and Reversible

This method is completely safe and fully reversible. Your plugin files, configurations, and settings remain intact. No data is lost, modified, or moved to different locations. You can restore hidden plugins instantly with a single click.

Key Features That Make Plugin Management Easy

Bulk Hide and Show Actions

The plugin integrates seamlessly with WordPress’s native bulk actions interface. Select multiple inactive plugins and hide them all at once using the “Make Hidden” bulk action. Similarly, restore multiple plugins simultaneously with the “Make Visible” action.

This bulk functionality saves significant time when managing large plugin collections.

Hidden Status Filter

WP Hidden Plugins adds a “Hidden” status filter to your plugins page, alongside the standard “All,” “Active,” and “Inactive” filters. Click the Hidden filter to view all your hidden plugins in one place, making it easy to review and restore plugins when needed.

The status filter displays the total count of hidden plugins, giving you instant visibility into how many plugins you’ve hidden.

Security Features Built-In

Security is paramount when manipulating plugin directories. WP Hidden Plugins includes multiple security layers:

• Capability Checks: Only administrators with the activate_plugins capability can hide or show plugins
• Active Plugin Protection: The plugin prevents hiding any active plugins, protecting your site from accidental breakage
• Self-Protection: The plugin cannot hide itself, ensuring you always maintain access to restore hidden plugins
• Optional Password Protection: Add an extra security layer with password protection for hiding/showing actions

Error Handling and Logging

The plugin includes comprehensive error handling to manage edge cases:

• Validates that source directories exist before attempting to rename
• Checks for naming conflicts to prevent overwriting existing directories
• Logs detailed error messages for troubleshooting
• Handles single-file plugins appropriately (which cannot be hidden due to WordPress architecture)

How to Use WP Hidden Plugins

Getting started with hiding WordPress plugins takes just a few minutes.

Installation

1. Download the plugin from GitHub or install it from your WordPress admin
2. Upload to /wp-content/plugins/ directory
3. Activate through the Plugins menu
4. That’s it—no configuration required

Hiding Plugins

To hide inactive plugins:

1. Navigate to Plugins in your WordPress admin dashboard
2. Ensure the plugins you want to hide are inactive (deactivate if needed)
3. Select the checkboxes next to the plugins you want to hide
4. Choose Make Hidden from the bulk actions dropdown
5. Click Apply

You’ll see a success notification confirming how many plugins were hidden. The plugins will disappear from your main plugins list.

Important: You can only hide inactive plugins. Active plugins are automatically excluded to protect your site’s functionality.

Restoring Hidden Plugins

When you need to restore hidden plugins:

1. Go to Plugins in your WordPress admin
2. Click the Hidden status filter to view hidden plugins
3. Select the plugins you want to restore
4. Choose Make Visible from the bulk actions dropdown
5. Click Apply

The plugins will reappear in your main plugins list with all their original settings intact.

Optional Password Protection

For additional security, especially on multi-administrator sites:

1. Navigate to Settings > Hidden Plugins
2. Enter a password in the Admin Password field
3. Click Save Settings

Once set, only administrators with the manage_options capability can hide or show plugins. This prevents unauthorized manipulation of your plugin visibility settings.

Who Benefits from Hiding WordPress Plugins?

WordPress Developers and Agencies

Development teams managing multiple client sites benefit from hiding testing, development, and debugging plugins on production sites while keeping them available for troubleshooting.

Content Creators and Bloggers

Bloggers running seasonal content or promotions can hide event-specific plugins during off-seasons without losing configurations, then restore them quickly when needed.

WordPress Site Administrators

Any WordPress administrator managing more than 20 plugins will appreciate the cleaner, more organized plugins list that makes daily management tasks faster and easier.

E-commerce Store Owners

WooCommerce sites often accumulate payment gateway plugins, shipping plugins, and promotional tools. Hide unused options while preserving them for future sales events.

Best Practices for Managing Hidden Plugins

Regular Review Schedule

Set a quarterly reminder to review hidden plugins. Permanently delete plugins you haven’t used in 6-12 months to reduce security risks and storage usage.

Document Your Hidden Plugins

Keep a simple note of why you hid specific plugins, especially if multiple administrators manage the site. This prevents confusion when deciding whether to restore or delete plugins later.

Update Before Hiding

Always update plugins to their latest versions before hiding them. This ensures when you restore a plugin, you’re not immediately faced with security vulnerabilities or compatibility issues.

Test After Restoring

When restoring hidden plugins, especially after WordPress core updates, test thoroughly in a staging environment before activating on production sites.

Technical Requirements

• WordPress 5.0 or higher
• PHP 7.0 or higher
• Administrator user role with activate_plugins capability
• File system permissions allowing directory renaming

Why Choose WP Hidden Plugins?

Unlike plugin management solutions that simply filter your view or require complex configurations, WP Hidden Plugins offers a genuine hiding mechanism that removes plugins from WordPress’s detection entirely while preserving all data.

The plugin is:

• Free and open-source: Available on GitHub with GPL v2 license
• Lightweight: Minimal performance impact with clean, efficient code
• Standards-compliant: Follows WordPress coding standards and best practices
• Well-tested: Includes PHPUnit tests for reliability
• Actively maintained: Regular updates and security improvements
• Translation-ready: Full internationalization support for multilingual sites

Get Started Today

Stop cluttering your WordPress plugins list with inactive plugins. Hide them safely and restore them instantly whenever needed.

Download Developry WP Hidden Plugins from GitHub and take control of your WordPress plugin management today. Your cleaner, more organized WordPress admin dashboard is just one installation away.

Visit the GitHub repository to download the latest version, view documentation, report issues, or contribute to development.

Transform your WordPress plugin management experience—hide plugins without deleting them, maintain a clean plugins list, and preserve all your configurations for future use.