Over time, our computers pile up more and more files and apps that, if left unchecked, can seriously undermine the experience. That applies to the Windows 11 context menu, too, as more and more apps register items that appear on it. These items are registered as shell extensions, and adding more of them means that the menu takes that much longer to load all of its content. If you have a lot of apps that create context menu entries, it gets to the point where the menu is slow to open, or it might even cause crashes and other problems.

Luckily, if you want to speed up your context menu, you can remove the entries you don't need from a centralized interface thanks to an app called ShellExView. Here's why you should be using it.

How it works

ShellExView is so much easier

The way context menu entries are added is through the Windows Registry, and while you can try to navigate the Registry Editor to find and delete entries you don't want, this process is extremely cumbersome and tedious. ShellExView is really cool in that it gathers all your items into a user-friendly (if slightly outdated) view that lets you easily see and identify each entry.

In fact, ShellExView includes all kinds of shell extensions, but if you want to focus on the context menu, you can sort the list by type to have all the context menu entries together. ShellExView makes it really easy to understand all the kinds of context menus where an item might appear, too. Using the Registry Editor would force you to jump around numerous sections to see the possible situations where each item may appear, but ShellExView has tabs that shows exactly which part of File Explorer causes a given item to appear. For example, some context menu items may only appear on the desktop. But most of them are related to file extensions or folders, so you can see that here, too.

It's also really easy to enable or disable a specific context menu entry. You can select one or more options and right-click, then choose Disable selected items. You can also re-enable certain items if you regret your changes.

If you have any doubts, ShellExview also makes it easy to search up the name of an entry to see what it might be related to, so it's all made very seamless, even for a relative newbie.

Clean up your context menu

It just gets messy

One big reason to disable context menu items is simply ease of use. If you have a ton of items showing up every time you open a context menu, it just gets harder and harder to navigate. Cleaning up unnecessary items will allow you to focus on the things you actually use more frequently, so you can get things done faster.

Of course, another potential solution would be uninstalling the apps associated with those entries, but you may not always want to remove a specific app, you just don't want it in the Start menu. This makes it that much easier to do that. In some cases, I even found items for apps that I had already uninstalled, so this might help clean up some entries that don't even work.

Improved performance

Not so many items to load

Finally, of course, we have the most important part, which is performance. The Windows context menu is notoriously not very fast, and adding more shell extensions to it just makes everything worse. As more and more entries need to be populated, it takes that much longer for the menu to load properly, which can hinder your productivity.

Disabling items you don't need isn't just a visual improvement, but it reduced the workload for your PC, so the context menu opens that much faster. In some cases, you may even fix some crashes or other problems that can be caused by certain context menu items. It's all the more reason to give ShellExView a shot and disable some items you think you don't need. There's not much of a downside considering you can always bring them back if you want them again.

ShellExView is a great tool

There are plenty of ways you can improve your PC's performance and, in tandem, you productivity, but ShellExView is a relatively obscure solution you may not have thought about, and it can actually help. Removing items from your context menu will help improve your focus and speed up load times, plus it's much easier to use than going through the Registry Editor to find all these entries and disabling or deleting them manually.

That being said, there are some limitations. For example, I wasn't able to find entries created by Microsoft PowerToys. It's always a good idea to also check individual apps, as they often have options for disabling context menu entries.