What are WordPress Dashicons?

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Updated 29 October 2024

Key takeaway

Dashicons have been central to WordPress, offering a straightforward set of icons that assist navigation within the admin area. Despite no longer being updated, they remain relevant for developers and WordPress users alike. As WordPress shifts towards new icon libraries like WP Icons and MaxiBlocks, which offers over 14,329 icons and shapes for free, there is an opportunity to bring even more flexibility, variety, and customisation to WordPress projects.

WordPress Dashicons are a set of vector icons made just for fitting right into the WordPress admin area. Ever since they first showed up in version 3.8, they’ve been a big help for making the admin experience better. Before Dashicons came along, if you were making themes or plugins, you’d have to come up with your own icons for the admin side of things. Dashicons changed the game by offering a built-in set of icons that matched up well, making everything look consistent and clearer. Since they were introduced, Dashicons have gotten even better, with more icons and features for WordPress admins.

Section 1: Understanding WordPress Dashicons

Overview of Dashicons

WordPress Dashicons are a series of vector icons designed specifically for the WordPress admin interface. These icons primarily serve two purposes:

Visual representation: Dashicons stand for different tasks, kinds of content, and actions in the admin area. Having these icons makes things clearer and navigation easier for users.

Consistent design: Dashicons help make the whole admin interface look consistent and nice because all the icons have a uniform design.

The role of Dashicons in WordPress

Dashicons contribute to the WordPress ecosystem by: Icons significantly simplify WordPress web design within the admin dashboard. They create a cohesive and visually appealing look, promoting consistency across the interface. By visually representing functions, content, and actions, icons make the admin area significantly easier to navigate and understand. This leads to a smoother user experience, as the interface becomes more intuitive. Their vector format ensures icons remain crisp on any screen size, providing a scalable and flexible design solution. Furthermore, icons empower developers with a standardized visual language, helping them create themes and plugins that look polished and professional.

History and development

Dashicons began as a project in 2013 to provide WordPress with a consistent and scalable icon font, introducing an array of icons that improved visual cues for the WordPress admin interface. Designed by Mel Choyce-Dwan, these icons aimed to simplify the user experience, offering easily recognisable symbols across menus, post types, and toolbar elements. Before Dashicons, WordPress relied on images or varying icon sets, which created inconsistency and sometimes led to performance issues. By incorporating Dashicons, WordPress not only achieved a cleaner look but also improved loading speeds and adaptability with a single SVG-based font file, making icons appear sharp on any screen resolution.

Over the years, Dashicons evolved to meet the needs of a growing platform, adding new icons with every WordPress release to support expanded features. As WordPress grew more customisable, so did Dashicons, allowing developers to represent a range of new content types and functions within plugins, themes, and widgets. Despite its utility, WordPress began to phase out Dashicons in favour of scalable vector icons integrated within the block editor, better suited for Gutenberg’s flexibility. However, Dashicons remain an essential part of WordPress’s design history, and the legacy icons are still widely used and appreciated by many within the WordPress community.

Section 2: The Dashicons library

Exploring the library

The Dashicons library offers an extensive collection of vector icons for various functions in the WordPress administration area. These icons cover a wide range, including:

Icons in WordPress streamline your design process by providing clear visual cues for various elements within your website. They distinguish different content types (posts, pages, media, comments) with unique icons. Actions like adding, editing, deleting, saving, and publishing become instantly recognizable. Icons within the administration menu enhance navigation for areas like settings, plugins, and user management. Customization options for themes, menus, and widgets become more intuitive with the help of icons, and they can even clearly represent different statuses like success, warnings, and errors.

Dashicons have a ton of different icons, so pretty much everything in the admin area can have its own picture. This makes it easier for people to get what’s going on and move around the site.

Examples of commonly used Dashicons

Here are some of the most commonly used Dashicons within the WordPress admin:

Dashicon-admin-appearance: Represents the Appearance section of the admin menu.
Dashicon-edit: Used to indicate the edit functionality for various content types.
Dashicon-media-library: Represents the Media Library within the admin area.
Dashicon-menu: Used for menu-related functionalities.
Dashicon-plus: Represents the “add” function for new posts, pages, or other content types.

Categories of Dashicons

For easier navigation and identification, the Dashicons are divided into specific categories. Some of the main categories are:

Post formats: Icons for different post formats such as standard, sidebar and gallery.
Media: Icons for media types such as images, audio and video.
Other: Icons for more general functions such as location, search and clock.
Administration menu: Icons for different areas of the administration menu such as settings, plugins and users.

These categories help people quickly spot the icons they need based on what they’re doing. This tidy setup makes using the WordPress admin area a lot smoother and more user-friendly.

Section 3: How to use Dashicons in WordPress

For theme and plugin developers

Using Dashicons in your themes and plugins can really make a difference in how people experience the WordPress admin area. Here’s a quick guide on how to use them well:

Integrate Dashicons: To use Dashicons in your theme’s functions.php or plugin file, you need to queue the Dashicons style. Here is the code:

PHP
wp_enqueue_style( ‘dashicons’ );

For custom projects
Dashicons can also be useful for custom WordPress projects beyond themes and plugins. Here are some tips for integration:

Use a child theme
If you are customizing an existing theme, create a child theme to avoid conflicts with future theme updates.

Queue Dashicons
Similar to themes and plugins, use wp_enqueue_style to load Dashicons in your child theme’s functions.php file.

Integrate with the front-end
Although Dashicons are primarily designed for the admin area, they can be used sparingly on the front end for specific functions to ensure consistency with the overall WordPress experience.

Best practices for using Dashicons

To use Dashicons effectively in your WordPress design, keep these guidelines in mind: Prioritize clarity by choosing icons that have a direct and obvious connection to the function they represent. Avoid overwhelming users by using Dashicons sparingly; a few well-placed icons are more effective than cluttering your interface. Maintain a consistent visual language by using the same Dashicon style throughout your themes or plugins. Finally, ensure accessibility by carefully considering colour contrast between your chosen icons and the background, making your site easy to navigate for everyone.

By sticking to these tips, you can make the user interface of your WordPress projects look better with Dashicons. This will make everything clearer and easier to use in the admin area.

Section 4: Customizing and extending Dashicons

Creating custom Dashicons

While the official Dashicons project is no longer accepting icon requests, you can still create custom icons for your specific needs. Here’s an overview of the process:

Design the icon: Use vector design software such as Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape to create your customized icon. Make sure the design matches the overall style and size (usually 16×16 pixels) of the existing Dashicons.

Convert to font: Several online tools and resources can convert your SVG icon design into a font format compatible with WordPress. Some popular options include Icomoon (https://icomoon.io/) and Font Squirrel (https://www.fontsquirrel.com/).

Integration: Once converted, integrate your custom font into your theme or plugin using CSS. This involves defining the font family, including the font file, and specifying the icon class name for usage within your HTML.

Tools and resources for designing custom icons

Here are some helpful resources for designing custom icons that complement the style of Dashicons:

WordPress Dashicons reference: Review the existing Dashicon library for design inspiration and ensure your custom icons maintain stylistic consistency. (https://developer.wordpress.org/resource/dashicons/)

FontAwesome: A popular and extensive icon library that can serve as a reference point for design style and icon categories. (https://fontawesome.com/)

Icon cheat sheets: Several websites offer icon cheat sheets that showcase various icon styles and categories, providing valuable inspiration for your custom icon designs.

Extending Dashicons

The extension of the official Dashicons library is no longer officially supported. You can achieve a similar effect by creating custom icons and integrating them into your theme or plugin alongside the existing Dashicons.

Case studies or examples of extended Dashicons in action

Case studies highlight how WordPress developers have used Dashicons to streamline user interactions and bring greater coherence to custom plugins and themes. Take the example of a popular e-commerce plugin that wanted to improve its user interface by adding intuitive icons within WordPress for features like product management, inventory tracking, and order processing. Rather than designing a completely new icon set, the developers combined the existing Dashicons with a few custom icons to maintain visual consistency with WordPress’s native look. By doing so, they kept the interface familiar, reducing the learning curve for shop managers who were already comfortable with WordPress. This subtle integration of custom icons also sped up the development process, as the team could rely on a well-crafted, standardised base.

Another use case can be seen with a learning management system (LMS) plugin that integrated Dashicons to help educators and students navigate course content. Using Dashicons for common actions like course uploads, module navigation, and assessment marking gave the plugin a professional feel while aligning it with WordPress’s core admin design. The LMS developers also crafted a few custom icons for specialised actions, such as marking assignments and setting up quizzes, which blended seamlessly with the Dashicons set. This harmony between native and custom icons ensured a smooth and intuitive experience, helping educators and students easily recognise functions and encouraging more effective engagement with the platform.

Free WordPress shapes and masks — MaxiBlocks WordPress dashicons

Section 5: The future of Dashicons in WordPress

Dashicons and Gutenberg

With the introduction of the Gutenberg block editor in WordPress 5.0, the use of Dashicons within the editor itself has become somewhat limited. Here’s why:

Focus on blocks: Gutenberg utilizes a block-based interface, where functionality is represented by block types and icons.
Limited need for dashicons: While some Dashicons are still used for specific actions within the editor, the overall reliance has decreased.

The transition towards new icon libraries

The WordPress developer community has started exploring new icon libraries that offer greater flexibility and variety to meet the expanding needs of WordPress users. One such project is the WordPress Icons (WP Icons) initiative, which aims to create a more extensive and adaptable set of icons to cover a broader range of applications. Unlike Dashicons, which provides a more limited, static set, WP Icons intends to bring in a more dynamic library that can support the many customisations developers are after. This shift reflects the growing trend towards modular design, where icons can be tailored to different content types, user actions, and niche functionalities, making icons for WordPress more versatile for developers looking to create unique, feature-rich plugins and themes.

In addition to WP Icons, many designers are turning to third-party libraries that offer larger selections and diverse styles. For instance, MaxiBlocks provides an extensive library of 14,329 icons and shapes, which offers endless possibilities for website designers and developers wanting to build distinctive and visually consistent sites. This library is highly customisable, meaning it can adapt to various projects without losing cohesion with WordPress’s native aesthetic. The sheer range within MaxiBlocks’ library makes it easy for developers to find the right icons and shapes, whether for e-commerce, educational sites, or interactive portfolios. By integrating libraries like MaxiBlocks, the WordPress platform continues to grow more flexible, empowering developers to create visually engaging and intuitive interfaces for all types of users.

The future outlook

While the future scope of Dashicons within the core WordPress editor remains uncertain, they are likely to continue playing a role in the following areas:

Admin menu and settings: Dashicons will likely remain the primary icon set for the admin menu and various settings sections due to their familiarity and established usage.
Theme and plugin development: Looking ahead, developers can keep using Dashicons in their themes and plugins to improve how things feel and work in the admin area of WordPress.

Dashicons have been key in making the WordPress admin interface user-friendly. Their uniform looks and the clear way they show different functions have made it much easier for administrators, no matter their experience level, to get around and use the site.

How do I add free WordPress icons to my site?

You can add free WordPress icons using plugins, custom HTML/CSS, or by integrating icon libraries like MaxiBlocks’ free icon library.

How do I add WordPress icons to my menu?

You can add WordPress icons to your menu by using plugins like “Menu Icons by ThemeIsle” or by incorporating custom HTML and CSS.

Think about adding Dashicons to your WordPress theme or plugin projects to make the admin area more user-friendly.
Explore innovative ways to utilize Dashicons alongside custom icons or alternative icon libraries like WP Icons.
Share your thoughts and experiences with Dashicons in the WordPress community forums. What are some creative ways you’ve used Dashicons in your projects?

Additional resources:

Dashicons library reference: developer.wordpress.org/resource/dashicons

WordPress Block Editor Handbook: developer.wordpress.org/block-editor/reference-guides/components/dashicon

WordPress developer resources: developer.wordpress.org

Final thoughts

WordPress icons, including Dashicons, have shaped how users interact with the platform, providing clear visual cues that make navigation intuitive and accessible. Icons bring an immediate understanding of functions and content types within the admin area, which has been a huge asset for making WordPress approachable for users at all skill levels. Although the original Dashicons set is no longer actively developed, its impact on WordPress design and usability is unmistakable, reflecting the platform’s focus on user-friendly functionality.

As WordPress evolves and free WordPress icons become readily available, so does the demand for more flexible and varied icon options that meet the diverse needs of today’s developers. Moving forward, newer libraries and custom icon integrations are opening up creative possibilities for those looking to improve their site design and user experience. These advancements keep WordPress fresh and adaptable, ensuring it remains a popular tool for building and managing websites.

FAQ’s

1. What are Dashicons used for in WordPress?

Dashicons provide a standard set of icons for common actions and content types within the WordPress admin area.

2. Will Dashicons continue to receive updates?

No, active development on Dashicons has stopped, but they remain available for use in WordPress.

3. Can developers create custom icons compatible with Dashicons?

Yes, developers can add custom icons that match Dashicons’ style for a consistent look across plugins and themes.

4. Are there alternatives to Dashicons?

Yes, newer icon libraries like WP Icons and MaxiBlocks offer larger, more flexible options for designers needing more variety.

5. Is there a library similar to Dashicons that offers more icon choices?

MaxiBlocks provides a massive library of 14,329 icons and shapes, ideal for developers needing additional design flexibility.

6. What happens to Dashicons as WordPress moves towards other icon libraries?

Dashicons will remain in WordPress but may eventually be replaced by libraries offering more modern and adaptable icons.