What Is a Togle?

A toggle is a user-interface component that lets people manage the state of content or views. Toggles have a simple purpose: they help users update preferences, settings or other kinds of information that can have a big impact on their experience with your site or app.

The term toggle also applies to the way a computer user switches between different programs or applications. This is usually done by using a combination of keystrokes and mouse movements to navigate between programs, such as switching between Microsoft Excel and the Windows calculator. Toggles are often used for this kind of functionality, but they can be used to do much more as well.

Toggles can be used to manage many aspects of a product, including navigation, layout, and presentation. They are a very useful tool for teams that need to rapidly change the look and feel of a page or application, and they can be especially effective when combined with the power of A/B testing and other data-driven optimizations.

Unlike other user interface components, toggles don’t use text to communicate their state, but instead rely on a visual appearance. This makes it important for teams to think carefully about the meaning conveyed by the visual cues they use and be sure that the toggles they build are consistent across platforms. This is especially important for WCAG compliance, as color alone can convey very different meanings to users with various disabilities.

One of the key benefits of toggles is that they can be configured at runtime. This means that a team can use a feature flag system to dynamically re-configure specific toggle instances of a product without having to re-deploy a release. This is particularly useful for things like Experiment Toggles or more dynamic toggle configurations. While this flexibility is a great benefit it’s important to note that toggle configurations should generally be short-lived (a week or less) as they are designed to be transitionary by nature.

When a toggle is rolled out into production it’s important to test the overall system with both toggles Off and On. This helps to ensure that the intended behavior is enabled when a toggle is flipped On and that any existing or legacy behavior is disabled when the toggle is Off. Some teams also find it helpful to test a fallback configuration with all toggles flipped Off so that any regressions can be quickly identified and corrected.

Visibility toggles can be used to hide parts of an article for logged-out users. However, this method does not fully hide the content from people who are able to inspect the source code for the article. This is why it is recommended to use other methods of hiding content, such as subscriber group containers or hidden comments (available in the Grandmaster subscription tier and above).