While helping a client prepare their WordPress site for a new product launch, I ran into a familiar annoyance that has become far too common in the WordPress admin.
Their team mentioned how distracting it was to manage orders or write blog posts while dealing with all the little plugin notifications, popups, and even what looked like ads. Every plugin seems to come with its own set of red bubbles, banners, and pleas for five-star reviews. Very frustrating trying to distinguish between real notifications and plugins trying to draw attention to announcements about their next sale.
I understand why it happens. I’ve implemented these same kinds of growth nudges in SaaS products. But in the WordPress admin, where the focus is usually on managing content, it can feel excessive.
Fortunately, WordPress is flexible. The same freedom that allows plugin developers to show these notifications also makes it possible to remove them.
So, I wrote a small plugin called Admin NagBlock. It adds a page under the Tools menu where you can define a list of CSS selectors to target the elements you need to get rid of. There’s a small delay before the code runs but the goal was to create a quick, clean, and reusable tool for client sites. If it needs some additional polish I’ll work on something more robust without the delay.
It’s a simple solution, and I’m sure similar plugins already exist, but this one does exactly what I need and makes it easier to reduce admin clutter for clients.
Feel free to use it, fork it, or adapt it to your workflow: