How to Change WordPress Admin Post Columns Order

Are you looking for a way to change the order of columns within the admin? While there’s probably a plugin for this, we have created a quick code snippet that you can use to change WordPress admin post column order.

What you have is two variables, you’ll need to change $move and $before. ‘Move’ is the name of the column you would like to move. ‘Before’ is the name of the column you would like to move it before.

Instructions:

All you have to do is add this code to your theme’s functions.php file or in a site-specific plugin:

add_filter('manage_posts_columns', 'column_order');
function column_order($columns) {
  $n_columns = array();
  $move = 'author'; // what to move
  $before = 'title'; // move before this
  foreach($columns as $key => $value) {
    if ($key==$before){
      $n_columns[$move] = $move;
    }
      $n_columns[$key] = $value;
  }
  return $n_columns;
}

If you want to move multiple columns you will need to do things in another way as the above code was just to make things as simple as possible. The next snippet will move both the date and author columns before the post title column.

add_filter('manage_posts_columns', 'column_order');
function column_order($columns) {
  $n_columns = array();
  $before = 'title'; // move before this

  foreach($columns as $key => $value) {
    if ($key==$before){
      $n_columns['date'] = '';
      $n_columns['author'] = '';
    }
      $n_columns[$key] = $value;
  }
  return $n_columns;
}

Note: If this is your first time adding code snippets in WordPress, then please refer to our guide on how to properly add code snippets in WordPress, so you don’t accidentally break your site.

If you liked this code snippet, please consider checking out our other articles on the site like: 43 best photography themes for WordPress and how to create a WordPress donation form.