The word toggle is an adjective that means “a switch that can be set in one of two positions—on or off.” You might use a toggle to adjust the light on your desk or turn off the television. Toggles are also used on websites and apps to allow users to change preferences or settings, like enabling or disabling features or changing default options. They can help you keep your site or app clean and organized, allowing you to focus on the things that matter most to your audience.

In addition to being a useful tool for developers, the term toggle has a deeper meaning that can have a positive impact on the lives of users. Toggles can be thought of as a metaphor for the way that humans move between states. For example, people might toggle between a workday and a weekend or between a video chat with friends and a conference call with clients.

While toggles are a great way to hide content from logged-out users, they don’t work in all contexts. Hidden content is still visible to anyone who knows where to look, and it’s difficult to hide content that appears in article previews or other dynamic features. Additionally, if you have multiple different toggles on your page, they may conflict with each other or override each other’s behavior.

Toggles can be useful for developers, but they should only be used when they are appropriate. They can be used to update user preferences or settings, but they should not be used as a substitute for other methods. For example, a toggle shouldn’t be used to show or hide content that is already available through other methods, such as a stream or map view.

Moreover, if toggles aren’t implemented with accessibility in mind, they can create cognitive problems for users. For example, using a green background color to indicate an on state can be confusing for users with red/green color blindness or other vision impairments. It’s better to avoid using colors to indicate state and instead rely on labels, standard visual design, and clear context to make your toggles easy to understand.

When implementing a toggle, it is important to give it an unique name. This will help your team identify it and know what it does. This can also be helpful when debugging, as it will make it easier for someone to figure out the code that is causing an issue.

Another best practice is to regularly prune old toggles from your codebase. This will help prevent them from clogging up your application and increasing load. This process can be performed manually or with a plugin that automates the removal of outdated toggles. This is especially important if you have a large number of toggles that are inactive and not being used. This will reduce the amount of maintenance work your team has to do and free up resources for new features.