How to Disable WordPress Emojis

First off, I didn’t write this. Ryan Hellyer did. I only came across this fix from a post written by Justin Downey. The short-end of it is, drop this block of code into the bottom of your functions.php file. I made some tiny tweaks:

if (!function_exists('disable_emojis')) {
  function disable_emojis() {
    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' );
  }
  add_action( 'init', 'disable_emojis' );
}

I really needed this personally, because MailChimp was parsing my RSS feed verbatim, and for whatever reason, when WordPress added Twemoji to core in 4.2 it forces the emoji markup to be an inline-image — which, I get it. It’s useful for older devices who may not support emoji. But it was completely wrecking my email campaigns styles, yuck! 🤢

Thankfully, this function works in disabling the Twemoji images altogether! Tested up to: 5.2.2 👍