Disable Emojis (GDPR friendly)

Description

This plugin disables the new WordPress emoji functionality. GDPR friendly.

Note: Emoticons will still work and emojis 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 emojis in older browsers.

GDPR compliancy

This plugin does not do anything to make your site less GDPR compliant. It disables the DNS prefetching of emojis within WordPress, which should ensure improved privacy. To determine if your site is GDPR compliant, please seek legal advice. I have done my best to ensure the plugin is 100% GDPR compliant, but I am not a lawyer so can not guarantee anything 😉

Installation

After you’ve downloaded and extracted the files:

  1. Upload the complete ‘disable-emojis’ folder to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory OR install via the plugin installer
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  3. And yer done!

Visit the Disable Emojis plugin for more information.

Reviews

2025-06-09
Disable Emojis by Ryan Hellyer is a gem! With 60k+ active installs and nearly perfect 5-star rating, it’s clearly doing something right. This lightweight plugin strips out WordPress’s bloated emoji code while keeping your content looking great in modern browsers. The GDPR-friendly bonus is huge – it stops DNS prefetching to external emoji servers, protecting visitor privacy. Ryan’s been maintaining this for years and it shows. Your site loads faster, stays compliant, and emojis still work naturally. Win-win-win!
Read all 106 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Disable Emojis (GDPR friendly)” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Disable Emojis (GDPR friendly)” has been translated into 20 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

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Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.7.7

  • Confirmed support for newer WordPress versions.

1.7.6

  • Confirmed support for newer WordPress versions.

1.7.5

  • Added Composer support.

1.7.4

  • Fixing typos.

1.7.3

  • Unneeded version bump to shut the WordPress.org notice up.

1.7.2

  • Subtle improvement to code cleanliness.
  • Improved documentation regarding GDPR issues.

1.7.1

  • Added GDPR friendly label on advice from Ipstenu.

1.7

  • Removed DNS prefetch URL again.
  • This time using simple string check rather than relying on internal WordPress filters.

1.6

  • Removed DNS prefetch URL. Props to Aaron Queen for assisting with this.

1.5.3

  • Catering to new DNS prefetch URL in version 4.7 of core

1.5.2

  • Improved documentation.
  • Removed redundant dns prefetching. Thanks to Milan Dinic for the pull request.

1.5.1

  • Updating documentation.

1.5

  • Catering for invalid $plugin array.

1.4

  • Updating to use Otto’s code.

1.3

Removing extraneous styles.

1.2

Bug fix.

1.1

Updating to work with latest beta.

1.0

Initial release.