Removing columns from pages and post tables in WordPress

So you’ve installed Yoast (or some other plugin) and now your post columns are unmanageable?

This problem is normally caused when you have too many plugins adding to the post columns of the post table view.

Thankfully I have a solution for you!

To begin with we will need to open our theme or plugin functions.php and create a function to handle removing the unwanted columns.

function remove_yoast_columns($columns) {

}

We can then use <a>php unset</a> to remove the entry from the $columns array being passed. I am removing the ‘wpseo-score’ and ‘wpseo-score-readability’ variables.

function remove_yoast_seo_columns($columns) {

    // Remove Score
    unset($columns['wpseo-score']);

    // Remove Score Readability
    unset($columns['wpseo-score-readability']);

    return $columns;

}

Finally we need to hook a filter to use our remove function. The syntax is as follows:

add_filter('manage_[post_type]_posts_columns', '[function_name]', [priority?]);

For our example the code looks like this:

add_filter('manage_product_posts_columns' , 'remove_yoast_columns', 11);

Congratulations! Your post tables should now be easier to maintain.

N.B. Some other things that you might want to remove (depending on whether you are using them):

// Remove Author
unset($columns['author']);

// Remove Tags
unset($columns['tags']);

// Remove Comments
unset($columns['comments']);