What Is the Hello Dolly Plugin in WordPress?

WordPress’s own plugin documentation calls Hello Dolly the world’s first official WordPress plugin. Plugins arrived in WordPress 1.2 (“Mingus,” released May 22, 2004), and they’re one of the main reasons the CMS became as popular as it is.

Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-founders of WordPress, wrote it as a tribute to the software’s roots. On a live site it does nothing useful, and that’s by design: its value is part history, part teaching aid.

Where the lyrics appear

Hello Dolly ships installed but deactivated, so a fresh site shows nothing until you switch it on. Once activated, the plugin prints a single random line from the song in the upper right of every screen in your admin dashboard. It never outputs anything on the public side of your site, so visitors can’t see it. Reload any admin page and the line changes.

A single-file plugin you can read

Hello Dolly’s practical use is educational: it’s a readable example of how a plugin is put together. The entire plugin is one PHP file, hello.php, under 3 KB, sitting directly in wp-content/plugins. WordPress recognizes a PHP file as a plugin by its plugin header, a structured comment at the top of the file; Hello Dolly fills in the rest with the song’s lyrics and two admin hooks, one that prints the line and one that styles it. The official Plugin Handbook uses it as its example of a single-file plugin. Open wp-content/plugins/hello.php in a text editor and you can read the whole file in a couple of minutes. When you’re ready to write your own, our guide to building your first WordPress plugin starts at exactly that level.

Hello Dolly today

As of August 2026, the plugin directory lists Hello Dolly at version 1.7.2 with 600,000+ active installations, still credited to Matt Mullenweg. It still ships with WordPress itself: hello.php sits in wp-content/plugins in WordPress 7.0.3, the current release, published August 6, 2026. WordPress’s plugin documentation lists two default plugins included with core, and Akismet, the comment-spam filter, is the other one. Akismet is the bundled plugin with a real job: it starts filtering once you activate it and add an API key. Some WordPress hosts strip the default plugins from their one-click installs, so you may not see either one on a fresh site.

How to delete Hello Dolly

Deleting Hello Dolly is safe. Its single file registers no settings and stores nothing in your database, so nothing your visitors see will change. In your dashboard, go to Plugins, click Deactivate under Hello Dolly if it’s active, then click Delete. Because the entire plugin is that one hello.php file, the single delete removes everything.

Keep it if the lyric makes you smile; delete it if you want a lean install. Either way, the general rule is worth following: remove plugins you don’t use, because every plugin you keep is code you have to keep updated.