Hiding Pinterest Pins - How to Do It and Why

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When you talk about hiding Pinterest pins, there’s actually two conversations here. One is about how to hide pins in your blog posts to keep everything speedy but still be there when someone wants to pin it. The other is about hiding those old shocking pins from way back when from your home feed.

But don’t worry, whichever question you have about hiding pins, we are going to dive into it today.

Table of Contents

How to hide pins on Pinterest and why

Let’s start with hiding pins on Pinterest – in your home feed, your boards or profile.

Hiding and unhiding pins gives you the chance to have more control over what you see. It’s also a handy tool to help tell Pinterest what you do and don’t like.

With their latest algorithm change, they are testing more types of content in the feed and on more topics. That means you might seem things that don’t relate to anything you have searched for before.

Here’s a couple of examples from my feed, with the aqua boxes around them.

I’ve never searched anywhere about yoga (I don’t think my back is up for it) nor for Skoda cars (as I don’t drive). Pinterest is popping in these promoted pins in case I might be interested in them.

The same is starting to happen with non-promoted pins. And that’s where hiding pins can be handy.

Hiding a pin on home feed

In this example, if you click the three little dots beside the pin, another menu opens up.

There are three options with this being promoted – hide pin, why am I seeing this ad and report pin. For our purposes, the hide pin is the option we want.

Then you get a screen saying that they won’t show you this pin and a clickable option to tune your home feed (which is worth doing periodically).

Unhide a Pinterest pin

If you decide to hide a pin for some reason, then realise that you don’t want to hide it or hide it by accident (like when your cat walks across your keyboard) then that’s no problem.

Simple hit that ‘undo’ button at the bottom of the pin and it will return to its place in your feed.

Using the mobile app

How to hide Pinterest pins on the mobile app is slightly different. Here you tap on the right bottom corner to select the hide option.

Or you can hold the pin and when the ‘X’ appears in the corner, use this to hide the pin. You can also undo it while still on the page in the same way as on desktop.

Secret boards to hide pins

One thing you can’t do is hide your own pins. But if you want to add pins and have them only appear on your account, the answer is to use secret or private boards.

These are boards that appear with a padlock in the left corner when you look at all your boards. They are usually underneath the rest of your boards.

You can make any board secret or change it to a normal board. If you make a secret board live, all of those pins will appear in your feed.

You can also archive a board where you can no longer add pins to it, and it will show ‘archived’ beside the number of pins. Again, this can be reversed.

How to hide pins in a post and why

So that answers the question of ‘how do I hide pins on Pinterest’ now let’s dive into how and why to hide pins in blog posts.

First up, there’s the why. Why would you hide pins in blog posts?

The answer is that you wouldn’t always hide them. Or all of them. Or any of them. It’s a personal choice.

The logic behind hiding them is that Pinterest pins are large images. They take up space, can look awkward and slow down load speeds.

This isn’t the whole story with plugins that can lazy load and lots of other clever stuff. But let’s run with this as the why for now.

How to hide pins with code

If you aren’t averse to a little CSS, then the easiest way to hide a pin is to use a little bit of code.

Pinterest’s recommended option in terms of code to hide an image is the ‘data-pin-media’. This works by attaching your pin image to another image that appears in your post, say a normal horizontal image or a screenshot.

You then edit the HTML code for the image. To do this:

Add the image as normal and add the image to hide
Switch to the ‘text’ option and find the code for the two images – it is the section that starts src=”www.thenameoftheimage.com” for each image
Combine the two by cutting the code for the image to be hidden and adding it to the one to remain in the post – it will be pasted after the height numbers but before the closing brackets
In front of this section you have pasted, add the data-pin-media code and remove the src section
Switch back to visual and make sure only one image appears

Or in other words, the image to be visible should have the code that looks like this:

If you want to see more on this, check out the video below

Best plugins to handle this

Personally, this level of code is a little above what I want to master at this point. So I use a plugin to handle the job for me.

There are two main options out there to hide Pinterest pins within a post – Grow by Mediavine (formerly Social Pug) and Tasty Pins.

Both of these are excellent plugins. I’m using Grow at the moment because I started with it before I knew about Tasty Pins. But I use all of their other plugins on my food blog, so I know theirs is a good option too.

With Grow, you can designate a Pinterest image, add a title and description and also hide more additional images. These images only appear when someone uses a social share button, a Pin It extension or something like Tailwind.

You can also attach the Pinterest description to the image, and have it show in the post. This means you don’t need to use code to ensure the right description always pins with the image.

You can even include a custom tweet, social media description and image if you don’t want to use your featured image or meta description for these purposes.

Hiding pins all over the place

Hiding pins both on Pinterest and on your post gives you more control than you would get normally. It allows you to customise your feed, to tell Pinterest what you want to see and don’t. And by controlling visibility in your posts, you can ensure a quick post speed and a great user experience.

Have you ever hidden pins on your posts and what method did you use?

Hiding Pinterest Pins – How to Do It and Why