It is probably already well known, if you're doing Ajax, I might not be popping any big secrets here. But I was reading Wicket in Action tonight, and ran across a very helpful tidbit on how to properly hide a component. If you've constructed a component that you'd like to show, upon an action, you need at least a dummy tag in the dom to attach off of. Add this to that component and you can happily .setVisible(false) and unhide it later.