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Disable Emojis

The provided code snippet disables emojis in WordPress. This could be useful in cases where you want to improve site performance by reducing unnecessary HTTP requests, or simply because you don’t use emojis on your site.

This script does a number of things:

  1. The print_emoji_detection_script action is removed from both the wp_head and admin_print_scripts hooks, stopping the script that detects if the browser supports emojis from being printed.
  2. The print_emoji_styles action is removed from both the wp_print_styles and admin_print_styles hooks, stopping the CSS for emojis from being printed.
  3. The wp_staticize_emoji filter is removed from the the_content_feed and comment_text_rss hooks, stopping emojis from being turned into static images in the RSS feed.
  4. The wp_staticize_emoji_for_email filter is removed from the wp_mail hook, stopping emojis from being turned into static images in emails.
  5. A new callback function is added to the tiny_mce_plugins filter which removes the wpemoji plugin from TinyMCE, which is used for the post editor.
  6. A new callback function is added to the wp_resource_hints filter which removes the URL for the emoji SVGs from the list of URLs to prefetch for performance.

Add this code to your theme’s functions.php file to disable emojis in WordPress. Note that you should test this on a staging or local version of your site before implementing it on a live website.

PHP
/**
 * Disable the emojis in WordPress.
 */
add_action( 'init', function () {
	remove_action( 'wp_head', 'print_emoji_detection_script', 7 );
	remove_action( 'admin_print_scripts', 'print_emoji_detection_script' );
	remove_action( 'wp_print_styles', 'print_emoji_styles' );
	remove_action( 'admin_print_styles', 'print_emoji_styles' );
	remove_filter( 'the_content_feed', 'wp_staticize_emoji' );
	remove_filter( 'comment_text_rss', 'wp_staticize_emoji' );
	remove_filter( 'wp_mail', 'wp_staticize_emoji_for_email' );
	// Remove from TinyMCE.
	add_filter( 'tiny_mce_plugins', function ( $plugins ) {
		if ( is_array( $plugins ) ) {
			return array_diff( $plugins, array( 'wpemoji' ) );
		} else {
			return array();
		}
	} );
	// Remove from dns-prefetch.
	add_filter( 'wp_resource_hints', function ( $urls, $relation_type ) {
		if ( 'dns-prefetch' === $relation_type ) {
			$emoji_svg_url = apply_filters( 'emoji_svg_url', 'https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2/svg/' );
			$urls          = array_diff( $urls, array( $emoji_svg_url ) );
		}
		return $urls;
	}, 10, 2 );
} );