Remove overhead from the HTML, speed up your website and disable widgets you don't use
As of April 2026, Remove WordPress Overhead is a WordPress clean plugin with 1.0K+ active installations and a 5/5 rating from 5 reviews. It has been downloaded 28K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 6.0+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2016. Last updated 1 year ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are up 33% this week. Top alternative: WP-Sweep.
A standard WP installation contains many links in the head of your HTML (which slow down your site) and has standard widgets you might never use. You can now install this plugin and check the items you want to have removed. The saved options are cached for better performance.
Header items you can remove:
* Remove dashicons CSS from frontend
* Remove RSD / EditURI Link
* Remove WLW Manifest Link
* Remove RSS Feed Links
* Remove Next & Prev Post Links
* Remove Shortlink URL (also from http headers)
* Remove WP Generator Meta
* Remove Version Numbers from Style and Script Links
* Disable WP Emoji / emoticons
* Disable JSON API
* Disable Canonical URL
* Remove WooCommerce Generator Meta
* Remove jQuery Migrate script
* Disable XML-RPC methods that require authentication
* Remove all scrip…
great job work properly
Cool stuff!
I’m shocked this plugin doesn’t have more downloads and positive reviews. I have been searching a while for a plugin to remove header output from my site. There are many plugins that will do one or two but no free ones that offer all of them. I also am hesitant with altering my functions.php file or creating a child theme to do so. Using this plugin bypasses losing the settings upon theme update and the management overhead of child themes.
For me this plugin is most useful to remove the extraneous header information that is not necessary for my websites such as… rss+xml, Comments Feed, wp-json, rsd+xml, wlwmanifest+xml, json+oembed, xml+oembed. I just use this plugin to disable header information but love the other capabilities.
If you don’t have the technical knowledge to understand what you are disabling… then research it or don’t disable. You have the option of enabling/disabling at a granular level just as the one user proved with his 2 star rating. Some of the URL options can alter the pages people are used to accessing on your site. The 2 star rating proved they were not qualified to make the changes they did. Don’t blame the plugin, blame yourself!!
Works even on my very old WP installation. Does exactly what is states.
Made by me, because I was always pasting in the same code in my theme functions file. So I made a plugin for it 🙂
| WordPress | 6.0+ requiredTested up to 6.6.5 |
| PHP | false+ required |
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.