How to hide PHP Warnings and Notices in WordPress

From time to time a user comes to me and says “I see some PHP notices and warnings on my page”.

Most of the time these are nothing to worry about (though the plugin/theme developer should know about these so that they may fix them in a future release). PHP warnings and notices are nothing to worry about on a production site most of the time.
Some of these can even be generated because the developer has to keep compatibility with older versions of WordPress as well as older PHP versions.

The solution:

If you simply set WP_DEBUG to false in your wp-config.php file you should be fine. These don’t affect your site in any way.

However, the problem is that some times the above does not work.
That can happen most times on cheap shared hosts that force displaying PHP warnings and notices.
In that case, you can replace this line from your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

In either case, you need to replace this line with the following code:

ini_set('display_errors','Off');
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL );
define('WP_DEBUG', false);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);

Don’t forget to save your changes and upload your wp-config.php file back to the server.

Turning on PHP Errors in WordPress

If you are working on a website on local server or staging area, then you may want to turn on error reporting. In that case you need to edit your wp-config.php file and replace the code you added earlier with the following code:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', true);

This code will allow WordPress to start displaying PHP errors, warnings, and notices again.

You can now visit your website to confirm that the PHP errors, notices, and warnings have disappeared from your website.