So you have a fancy plugin that’s doing something awesome on a WordPress admin page. The plugin needs some CSS and/or JS to work so you enqueue them in the admin_enqueue_scripts hook. All good™. Hmm, not really. What you did is correct, but not very responsible. The fact is, I rarely see plugins that do their stuff on all admin pages, so why enqueue the scripts and/or styles everywhere?

Here’s a simple trick to make a plugin enqueue its scripts & styles only on certain admin pages.

Let’s say we have a plugin that enhances the new and edit post screens:

/**
 * Enqueue admin script on new and edit post screens.
 */
function myplugin_enqueue_admin_scripts() {
	wp_enqueue_script(
		'myplugin-admin-script',
		plugin_dir_url( __FILE__ ) . 'script.js',
		array( 'jquery' ),
		'0.1.0',
		true
	);
}

add_action( 'load-post.php', 'myplugin_enqueue_admin_scripts' );
add_action( 'load-post-new.php', 'myplugin_enqueue_admin_scripts' );

Notice that we’re not using the admin_enqueue_scripts hook? That’s the trick! Instead, we’re using the load-(page) hook so that our script will only load on those pages.

Further Reading

• load-(page) at the Codex.