Let's consider a normal website that has an about page, and you want to customize the about page differently from all the other pages. For example, you could display a photo of your company at the top of the sidebar, or you could display additional information at the bottom of the about page.
To do this, you need to define the $page parameter. If the page ID was 10, you could open your conditional statement with something like this:
if ( is_page(10) ) {
A specific page can also be specified by passing the page title to the function.
if ( is_page( 'About Us' ) ) {
You can also use the page slug. As you may recall, the page slug is the unique, named identifier that appears at the end of the URL. If your page URL is about
if ( is_page( 'about-our-company' ) ) {
Some conditional tags, such as is_page(), can also pass parameters in an array. The following conditional statement will return true if any of the conditions are true.
if ( is_page( array( 10, 'About Us', 'about-our-company' ) ) ) {
It is common for developers to set more than one condition when russian virtual mobile number using conditional tags. Let's go back to the simple task of displaying a welcome message to visitors to a blog. This is something that a corporate website might want to add to their blog area but not to other areas of their website (e.g. home page, contact page, about page, etc.).
To do this, you can use the conditional tags is_home() and is_single(), which represent the blog index and individual posts, respectively. To display a message in both areas, you need to use the logical operator OR ||. This is illustrated in the following code. The initial if statement checks whether the page is the blog index or an individual post. If either is true, the message is displayed.
if ( is_home() || is_single() ) {
echo "Welcome to Our Blog!!";
Another very useful logical operator is the AND operator &&. It is used when you want two or more conditions to be true before something is executed. The following if statement checks if a page is both an archive page and categorized in the news category. On pages in the news category, the welcome message will be displayed. On other categories, nothing will be displayed.
if ( is_archive() && is_category( 'News' ) ) {
echo "Welcome to the News Archives";
The AND and OR operators can be combined. The example below is taken from the functions.php template of the default WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme. The function is used to display the page title in the browser, however only part of the function is shown below.
The if statement returns a value of true if there is a site description and the user is viewing the blog index or home page. The site description can be entered via the tagline field in your general settings area. If you fill this field out, the title bar on your blog index and home page will display “Site Title | Site Description” (note: the separator is displayed using the string $sep in the code below). If you do not, the title bar will display “Site Title”.
if ( $site_description && ( is_home() || is_front_page() ) )
$title = "$title $sep $site_description";
Another logical PHP operator you can use is the not! operator. This is more practical to use in many circumstances. For example, let’s say you want to display a photo on all of your pages except your archives. There’s no need to set up a long conditional statement asking “Is this the home page, is this a single post, is this a page…”. It’s more practical to simply ask “Isn’t this an archive page?”
To do this, simply add an exclamation mark before the conditional tag. The following code shows how simple this is in practice. It will display an image on all pages of your website except the archive pages.
1stead of writing many individual statements for this, it is handy to use else and elseif statements. This allows you a greater degree of control over what is displayed on your website.
We can show this with an example. Let's say you want to display a different logo in different areas of your website. How would you do that? The answer is simple: We use else and elseif statements. The following code shows how this can be achieved.
Depending on which area of your website the visitor is viewing, one of the five logos shown in the code above will be displayed. This is a basic example that illustrates how easily else and elseif statements can be used to control many different areas of your website.
Else statements are also used in other parts of WordPress. Most functions.php templates use them, and many WordPress themes use them to change how your website title is displayed in browsers.
More conditional tags
There are a number of additional conditional tags available. Many of them are used by developers in themes and plugins.
Below is a list of some of the other conditional tags that are available to you.
is_tax () – Checks if a custom taxonomy archive page is displayed.
has_term () – Checks if the current entry has one of the specified terms.
taxonomy_exists () – Checks if the taxonomy name exists.
post_type_exists () – Checks if a post type exists.
is_post_type_hierarchical( $post_type ) – Checks if the post type is hierarchical.
is_post_type_archive() – Checks whether the archive page for a specific post type is displayed.
is_comments_popup () – Checks if the comments popup is open.
comments_open () – Checks if comments are allowed for the current post or page.
pings_open () – Checks if pings are allowed for the current post or page.
is_feed () – Checks if the current query is for a feed.
is_404 () – Checks if a 404 error is being displayed.
is_paged () – Checks if the page you are viewing is a paginated page other than page one. Posts and pages are paginated when the nextpage quicktag is used in content to break up large posts.
is_trackback () – Checks if a trackback is being used.
is_admin() – Checks if the user is logged into the admin area. This is not used to check if a user has admin privileges, only if they are logged into the WordPress dashboard.
is_page_template() – Checks if the page being viewed uses a page template. A specific page template can be defined, if required.
is_preview () – Checks if a blog post is currently being viewed in draft mode.
has_excerpt() – Checks if the current post has an excerpt. Specific posts can be defined.
has_nav_menu() – Checks if a menu location has a menu assigned to it. This is used by theme developers to display something in case the user has not added a menu.
in_the_loop() – Checks if the caller is still inside the WordPress loop.
is_active_sidebar( $index ) – Checks if a given sidebar is in use.
is_multisite () – Checks if multisite is supported.
is_main_site () – Checks if a multisite is the main site of the network.
is_super_admin () – Checks if a user is a super admin within the network.
is_plugin_active( $plugin ) – Checks if a plugin is activated.
is_child_theme () – Checks if a child theme is being used.
current_theme_supports( $feature ) – Checks if a theme supports a specific feature such as post formats or featured images.
Also check: How to remove default taxonomies .
Conditional tags are an important concept in WordPress. Because of how useful they are, there are few WordPress themes that are designed without them. Once you understand else, elseif statements, and logical operators like AND, OR, and Not; you'll be able to tackle any conditional function.
I hope this guide helped you learn how to use WordPress conditional tags in your themes.
If you enjoyed this article, please join IsItWP on Twitter .