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Disable Emojis in WordPress 4.2+ For a Faster Page Load

Last updated on by Gabriel Livan

As of WordPress 4.2, a new feature was introduced that allows you to use the new emojis (the tiny smiley icons). While on some WordPress setups is useful, in many situations, especially when you are not using WordPress as a blog, you just don’t need them and the file /wp-includes/js/wp-emoji-release.min.js is loaded along with extra inline JavaScript code.

As I want my page to load as fast as possible and have the HTML code clean when analysing the source code (as a developer), I’d rather have all that extra code removed, especially since it loads on every page of my website. There are 2 ways in which you can do that. We’ll start with the most convenient one:

1) Disable Emojis plugin

disable emojis plugin
This is the quickest way to do that and emoji’s will still work in browsers which have built in support for them. This plugin simply removes the extra code bloat used to add support for emoji’s in older browsers.
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Remove unused scripts & styles on WordPress pages | For faster load

Last updated on by Gabriel Livan

Some time ago, I mentioned about Plugin Organizer and the benefits of loading plugins on pages when we only need them as we want to decrease page size and make our WordPress pages load faster, especially if we use a cache plugin such as W3 Total Cache.

However, there are situations when we need a plugin on a page or we use a theme, but some of the CSS and JavaScript files are not needed. Imagine a contact page where you only have some text and a form and you are using a theme that loads plenty of useless CSS and JavaScript files. Not ideal for our website visitors that should enjoy a faster page load.

I’ve decided to write my first official free plugin and share it with the WordPress community.

WP Asset Clean Up scans the page you’re editing, detects the loaded scripts and styles and shows them in a list where you can choose the ones that you don’t want to load.
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Hide WordPress Widgets on Specific Pages / Posts

Last updated on by Gabriel Livan

wordpress logo There are situations when you would like to hide certain widgets from your sidebar or other place when your visitor is on a specific page or post. For instance, I removed the “About me” text widget from the “About” page as the information was redundant and it’s nice to have a clean, fast loading website without any unnecessary data loaded.

You can either do that by using a plugin, which is the easiest and quickest way of doing it or by adding a code in your functions.php (or a custom plugin where you have your settings). If you want to apply this to 1 page and 1 widget only and you’re comfortable editing code, then you can use my snippet code. If you have to hide a few widgets for more pages and posts, then using a plugin would have been easier to manage that.

I will show you how to do it both ways and you can decide based on your situation what’s the best option for you. It’s also good for you to see how it’s done in the code, so you can learn more 😉
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