The Adminimize WordPress Plugin is one of those things I wish I had found sooner. To protect our clients from themselves, we remove and block access to certain WordPress Admin pages that we feel could accidentally allow them to mess up their website. We use to do this through a combination of WordPress Roles and custom code that had to be painstakingly collected and tested. Most, if not all, that code is now redundant thanks to Adminimize.

There are lots of things in the WordPress admin area that your users don’t need to see or use. [The Adminimize WordPress] plugin help [sic] you to hide unnecessary items from WordPress admin area.

Use the Adminimize WordPress Plugin to clean up your Admin area

If you’ve ever installed or managed a WordPress website you’ll know how cluttered the Admin area can get after installing a few WordPress Plugins. As the WordPress (super) Administrator, you need these menu items to be able to manage the website. But not everyone does, namely the other registered users who also have access to the WordPress admin area.

Sadly, there are still many WordPress Plugins that do not properly leverage WordPress Roles & Capabilities in order to control access to their functions and settings. This is precisely the gap that Adminimize fills.

Settings Page for Adminimize WordPress Plugin

The Adminimize Settings Page. Daunting but comprehensive.

Here’s what Adminimizes supports:

  • Custom Roles. Did you create custom Roles for your WordPress website? Adminimize recognizes them and allows you to control who does and does not have access to certain main pages.
  • Menus added by other WordPress Plugins. This is Adminimize’s main strength. Block access to or simply remove the menu item added by other WordPress Plugins.
  • Removing items from the Toolbar. The Toolbar was formerly known as the Admin bar and is that black horizontal menu that appears at the top of your WordPress admin area. Adminimize allows you to edit the items that are here too.

Block access or simply remove the menu item; Adminimize can do both

By default, Adminimize blocks access to the removed item. This means that even if a user types in the URL to that menu page into the browser, Adminimize will deny them access.

But what if you only want to remove the menu item? Adminimize can do that too. The Plugin has an Allow Page Access setting which will remove menu items but still allow access to the menu page. This appears to be an All-or-Nothing setting meaning it will apply to all roles and all menu items i.e. there is no way to allow access to only some menu pages for some roles.