Disable/Remove Gutenburg in WordPress

If you recently updated your WordPress website and noticed that your post editor is completely different, then you have experienced the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress.

The Gutenberg editor was added to WordPress as the default editor in 2017. Some people really enjoy the new Gutenburg editor as it uses a block building system, but most people really dislike the Gutenberg editor.

In this article, we are going to show you how to remove the Gutenberg editor and go back to the original WordPress editor.

What is the Gutenberg Editor?

With the growth in popularity of WordPress page builder plugins, WordPress wanted to try and steal away some of those customers with their own default drag and drop builder, but they fell way short.

The Gutenberg editor was added to WordPress in 2017 as the default editor and is available for WordPress versions 5.0 and up. By default, Gutenberg allows you to build the following blocks:

• Gutenberg Editor Blocks
• Paragraph
• Heading
• Subheading
• Quote
• Image
• Gallery
• Cover Image
• Video
• Audio
• Columns
• File
• Code
• List
• Button
• Embeds

While Gutenberg is better than no page builder, it still needs a lot of work to be more UI friendly. We would recommend using a drag and drop builder like Visual Composer or Elementor.

Remove Gutenburg With a Plugin

WordPress knows that many people do not like the Gutenburg editor so they have provided a simple plugin that can revert your editor back to the default WordPress editor.

The plugin is called Classic Editor and it’s free and advisable in the plugin directory. with 5+ million downloads, you can easily see that its the preferred editor in WordPress.

You can easily find the plugin by going to Plugins->Add New. On the default plugin search directory page, you should see the Classic Editor plugin as its featured.

Click Install and activate and you will now notice that your posts and pages are back to the normal editor. Ah, relief!

You can now resume normal WordPress editor activities in the default editor or the WordPress Page Builder of your choice.

If you prefer not to install a plugin to remove Gutenberg, you can actually add a function to your functions.php file that will disable Gutenberg on your WordPress website.

Simply paste the code below into your functions.php file and you will remove Gutenberg.

// Disable Gutenberg on the back end.
add_filter( 'use_block_editor_for_post', '__return_false' );

// Disable Gutenberg for widgets.
add_filter( 'use_widgets_blog_editor', '__return_false' );

add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', function() {
    // Remove CSS on the front end.
    wp_dequeue_style( 'wp-block-library' );

    // Remove Gutenberg theme.
    wp_dequeue_style( 'wp-block-library-theme' );

    // Remove inline global CSS on the front end.
    wp_dequeue_style( 'global-styles' );
}, 20 );

This code will do the following things:

1. Disable Gutenberg for posts
2. Disable Gutenberg for widgets
3. Remove Gutenberg’s default CSS file and inline styles.

Why Remove Gutenberg Editor?

Many WordPress experts and even newbies prefer the old version of the WordPress editor and find the new Gutenberg editor confusing, clunky, and not user-friendly.

Will Removing Gutenberg Editor Mess Up My Website?

No, it’s completely safe to remove Gutenberg from your WordPress website. The aforementioned plugin is actually one of the highest downloaded plugins in the WordPress directory so fits completely safe.

Tyler Horvath

Tyler Horvath is an SEO Expert with over 15 years of experience in search engine optimization, popular blog author and WordPress SEO expert.