Removing Emoji & Emoticon Support from WordPress ;-)

Apparently, since its 4.2 update WordPress automatically converts text based smilies like “;-)” into emoji images like 😉

Besides being problematic regarding loading times (the script is loaded wether you use emojis or not) – the images might not fit the overall asthetics and design of the site while a text-only smiley might be preferred.

I started out by using WordPress hooks as described here:

remove_action('wp_head', 'print_emoji_detection_script', 7);
remove_action('wp_print_styles', 'print_emoji_styles');

…and amending this as described here:

function disable_wp_emojicons() {

  // all actions related to emojis
  remove_action( 'admin_print_styles', 'print_emoji_styles' );
  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_filter( 'wp_mail', 'wp_staticize_emoji_for_email' );
  remove_filter( 'the_content_feed', 'wp_staticize_emoji' );
  remove_filter( 'comment_text_rss', 'wp_staticize_emoji' );

  // filter to remove TinyMCE emojis
  add_filter( 'tiny_mce_plugins', 'disable_emojicons_tinymce' );
}
add_action( 'init', 'disable_wp_emojicons' );

  // disable TinyMCE emojicons
function disable_emojicons_tinymce( $plugins ) {
  if ( is_array( $plugins ) ) {
    return array_diff( $plugins, array( 'wpemoji' ) );
  } else {
    return array();
  }
}

  // remove the DNS prefetch 	
add_filter( 'emoji_svg_url', '__return_false' );

But this did not turn my text smiley back into plain text.

Then I discovered the plugin “Keep Emoticons as Text” which does the trick with a single line of code:

add_filter( 'option_use_smilies', '__return_false' );

You can easily put all above and this last line in the functions.php of your child theme – or, even better, in your own functional plugin. And you’re done 😉