How to list WordPress Hooks

List all WordPress hooks in use on a web page.

When debugging and troubleshooting WordPress websites, use a simple PHP snippet to list WordPress hooks utilized on a page. This helps identify any problem-causing hooks on your site or utilize any hook to enhance the capabilities of your WordPress website.

Code Snippet to view all WordPress Hooks

Add this code to either your theme or plugin file, ensuring that you use functions.php for themes and the main plugin file for plugins.

$debug_tags = array();
add_action( 'all', function ( $tag ) {
    global $debug_tags;
    if ( in_array( $tag, (array) $debug_tags ) ) {
        return;
    }
    echo "<pre>" . $tag . "</pre>";
    $debug_tags[] = $tag;
} );

Let’s delve into how this practice can help you:

List WordPress content hooks

WordPress content hooks are crucial for manipulating what appears on your website. They enable you to add, modify, or remove content in various locations, such as the header, footer, sidebar, or within your posts and pages. By viewing the hooks in action, you gain insights into how and where you can inject your custom code to precisely control the content.

List WordPress hooks and find the order

Hooks in WordPress follow a specific order when they’re executed. By examining the sequence of hooks, you can fine-tune your code to execute at the right time. This can prevent conflicts and ensure your customizations are applied precisely when you want them to be, without interfering with other plugins or themes.

List WordPress hooks and view all

WordPress offers an extensive list of hooks, both action and filter hooks, for various purposes. Observing all these hooks utilized on a page gives you a comprehensive overview of the possibilities. You can discover hooks you might not have known about and explore new ways to enhance your site’s functionality.

Find Action and filter hooks

Action hooks allow you to execute custom code at specific points in the WordPress workflow, whereas filter hooks enable you to modify data before it’s displayed. By viewing all hooks, you can easily distinguish between action and filter hooks, helping you make the right decisions when customizing your site. This clarity ensures that you’re taking the most suitable approach for your specific needs.

For instance, if you need to find the hook triggered immediately after the save_post hook in WordPress, utilize this code snippet to list all the hooks and locate the relevant one.

Action and filter hooks in WordPress

The difference between action and filter hook is:

Action Hooks are a very useful tool in WordPress and they are used to perform functions (actions) in specific locations of a theme or plug-in.

For Example, ‘woocommerce_before_main_content’ hooks can be used to add notices, and messages on every shop page.

Filter hooks are used to provide access to data used by any plugin or theme.

For example, WooCommerce is getting the price of a product to show it and calculate totals in the cart. You can use the ‘woocommerce_product_get_price’ filter hook to apply discounts on prices or change the price of a product dynamically.

“the_content” hook can be used to replace a specific word/sentence/whole content of a post.

Raja Aman Ullah

Raja Aman Ullah is a highly skilled WordPress and WooCommerce plugin developer working as a lead plugin developer. He developed numerous famous extensions including b2b, request a quote, ultimate membership, custom fields, and many others for WooCommerce that are trending on Extension Store. His products on WooCommerce have more than 100,000 active subscriptions and happy clients.
Hire me