---
title: "Removing Emoji & Emoticon Support from WordPress ;-)"
author: "Alex"
date: 2017-06-28
lang: en
source: https://voneff.de/en/removing-emoji-emoticon-support-from-wordpress/
---

# Removing Emoji & Emoticon Support from WordPress ;-)

[Apparently](https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/185577/disable-emojicons-introduced-with-wp-4-2), 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](http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/disable-wordpress-emoticons/):

…and amending this as described [here](https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/185577/disable-emojicons-introduced-with-wp-4-2):

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

Then I discovered the plugin “[Keep Emoticons as Text](https://wordpress.org/plugins/keep-emoticons-as-text/)” which does the trick with a single line of code:

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 ;-)