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Hide the Nagging WordPress Upgrade Notification to All Users But Admin

By Damien Oh

If you are a regular WordPress user, you will definitely see the WordPress Upgrade Notification whenever a new version of WordPress is released. With the release of WordPress 4.6, you will see the message “WordPress 4.6 is available! Please notify the site administrator,” prompting you to upgrade to the newest version. This is all fine if you are the only user of your site. In instances where your site has multiple contributors or if you are building a WordPress project for your client, you might want to hide this nagging indismissable message for all users except the administrator (or a user who has the capability to perform the upgrade).

The good thing about WordPress is that it comes with many hooks and filters, so you can easily hook on a (php) function to modify the result. And this is how we are going to hide the nagging WordPress upgrade notification message.

Note: hiding the message doesn’t mean it is unnecessary to update WordPress. It is important to always keep your WordPress up to date.

1. Locate your theme folder and find the “functions.php” file.

2. Add the following function to the end of the file.

function hide_update_notice() {
    if ( ! current_user_can( 'update_core' ) ) {
        remove_action( 'admin_notices', 'update_nag', 3 );
    }
}
add_action( 'admin_head', 'hide_update_notice', 1 );

What the above code does is first check if the current user has the capability to update WordPress. If not, then it will remove the message from the queue and won’t show up in the Dashboard.

3. Save the functions.php file and upload to your server, replacing the old file.

That’s it. Only an administrator or a user with the capability to upgrade WordPress will see the Upgrade notification in the Dashboard.

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Damien Oh Avatar
Damien Oh
Damien Oh started writing tech articles since 2007 and has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. He is proficient in Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, and worked as a part-time WordPress Developer. He is currently the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Make Tech Easier.

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