What are WordPress Action Hooks?

The moment you start digging the tiniest bit under the surface of WordPress in your attempt to either tweak your website or create a theme or plugin, you will come face-to-face with WordPress action hooks. The common question among people who are going deeper with WordPress is what are WordPress action hooks and how do I use them? So this post will answer those two questions, plus give you a boost up in your WordPress development pursuits.

So what are WordPress Action Hooks?

At a very basic level, WordPress action hooks are placeholders. They are specific locations in your WordPress theme that allow functions/code/etc to hook into. The most basic examples of action hooks that normally exist in every single WordPress site are the wp_head and wp_footer action hooks. Both of these are placeholders that are located at… (you guessed it)… inside the header of the theme and in the footer of the theme. Typical uses of these two action hooks are to place analytic tracking codes or to add some additional CSS files to a WordPress page. In a nutshell, a WordPress action hook is a predefined place on your site left open by the developer of the site where the user/developer can insert specific code to expand the capability of the site.

How do you use a WordPress Action Hook?

Let’s use an example of adding some additional meta tag descriptions to the section of our WordPress site. Because an action hook is just a placeholder, we need to create a function, a piece of code that will run in that action hook location. Our sample function will add a meta tag description to our WordPress site. This function is then hooked into the action hook by using the WordPress add_action() function. Now our site contains our new meta description tag because we’ve run the function in the wp_head action hook location. NOTE: There are better ways and more preferable ways to modify a WordPress site’s meta tags, this was simply used as an easy to follow example of hooks being used as placeholders.

Does my theme come with action hooks and what if it doesn’t have an action hook where I want it?

Most WordPress themes today have many action hooks to enhance the flexibility and capability of the theme. For example, iThemes Builder has a wide assortment of action hooks to give developers a lot of power in customizing the look and functionality of a site. But what if your theme doesn’t have the amount of action hook you want? Or what if your theme doesn’t have action hooks in the right place? This is an easy fix, because you can add your own action hooks to any WordPress theme. If you open up your theme’s template files (PHP files) you should be able to locate the location where you desire an action hook to reside. At that location, simple use this line of PHP code to create a new action hook. Now you can use the newly created my_new_action_hook to hook in your own functions and expand your current theme dynamically. So… how do you use WordPress action hooks?