Toggle is a feature flag that allows your team to control the way a certain part of a site or application behaves without touching your production codebase. Toggles can be anything from a simple “if” statement to complex decision trees that act upon multiple conditions. A wide variety of conditions can trigger a toggle to change state—from fitness tests run by other features, to a variable provided by a config file, to a value entered by a user on a form. By using a toggle and rolling out a new release, your team can experiment with different ways to improve their product without risking their production codebase or missing their delivery targets.

The word toggle is also used to describe a switch with two states—on or off. A toggle can be pressed many times in a row without causing any problems—it’s just the opposite of a button that’s hard to push and stays stuck. In the context of a software product, toggles can be very useful, as they enforce a mutually exclusive state and make the current state immediately obvious.

When designing a website that uses toggles, it’s important to consider the usability of those toggles. A toggle should be labelled in a way that makes it clear what the control will do, as well as how the control is currently being used. It’s also important to use an appropriate visual cue to indicate when a toggle has changed states—for example, by using a color change or animation.

By combining the functionality of toggles with other UI elements, you can create a layout that minimizes scrolling and maximizes user visibility. For example, if you have lots of article links in your articles and want to limit how much readers have to scroll to see them, you can use collapsible containers or Accordions instead of a toggle.

A toggle is often used to hide content in an article, so it’s important to think about the implications of hiding or displaying this content. Hidden content is not completely removed from the page—it’s still visible to anyone who knows how to inspect the source code of a web page or who uses a tool like Phantom VPN. Additionally, it’s important to be aware that even if content is hidden with a toggle, users will still have access to the permalink for the article, which could lead to them accidentally clicking the toggle again.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to leverage the power of toggles, you can check out our free ebook: Toggle Essentials: A Guide for Web Designers. The ebook covers everything from the basic principles of using toggles, to best practices and tips for implementation.

And if you’re ready to try out a toggles platform, be sure to check out Kameleon—the easiest way to manage feature toggles in your software. With Kameleon, you can easily create and update toggles in a single dashboard, without having to log into your source codebase.