How to Completely Disable Widgets in Windows 11

Customization is a key factor in how we interact with our gadgets. It could mean the difference between a clean visual/ performance experience and a cluttered and inefficient one. The windows OS comes with lots of these customizations and they keep adding new features to enhance the user experience. However, not all will find every feature useful.

On hover, the widgets feature on windows 11 is supposed to provide you with quick access to information right on the desktop. This may be useful to others but it could also be annoying when half your desktop is filled with information when you hover by mistake.

Luckily, Windows provides a way to disable the widgets feature if you wish to. You can disable it using the taskbar settings which removes the widget's icon from the taskbar but leaves it running in the background thus eating up system resources for no reason.

In this article, I will show you how to completely disable widgets in windows 11. Let's get started.

Disabling Widgets in Windows 11.

To disable the widgets, right-click on the taskbar and select taskbar settings as shown below.

This should open up a new window under Personalization Tab with the taskbar settings.

On this window, find the widgets setting and slide the toggle to off as shown below.

By doing so, the icon of the widget should disappear from the taskbar which means no accidental hovers anymore. You could stop here but the widgets feature is still using up resources on your computer. You can verify this by opening the Task Manager.

Pressing the Windows Key + W also opens the widget which means it is not completely disabled.

If you wish to disable it completely, Keep reading.

Disabling Widgets completely on Windows 11

To completely disable the widgets feature, you will have to uninstall it once and for all. Unfortunately, you won't find it in the Apps and Features list where other apps installed on your machine are shown. To uninstall it, we use a command line tool (PowerShell).

1. Open the terminal by pressing Windows key + X then select Terminal(Admin).

2. Once open, use the following command to delete the widget feature.

   Get-AppxPackage | Where-Object {$_.Name -like "*WebExperience*"} | Remove-AppxPackage
   

   This command will get information about installed Appx Packages and filter it using the name "WebExperiences" and then remove the package from the system.

   Note: The command above only works for your account. If you wish to remove it for all users, use the command below instead.

   Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Where-Object {$_.Name -like "*WebExperience*"} | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
   

   If the commands work without errors, the widgets feature should be completely removed from Windows 11.

Conclusion

The Widgets feature is a great feature for a percentage of users. Those that find it annoying, can disable it by deleting it from the system completely. This guide shows you how to delete the widgets feature from your machine to ensure that it is not taking up system resources. I hope the article was helpful. If you want more customization guides, check out our other tutorial on how to disable cortana completely on windows 10

Thank you for reading : )