“Our goal is to not be embarrassed by our website”
What Oxfordshire businesses want in 2026, and how it compares to the hype
- Gutenberg editor is clunky and frustrating compared to the classic editor it replaced
- It's possible to get rid of it without relying on plugins via a functions.php code snippet
- Code snippet included
In 2018 WordPress introduced the Gutenberg editor to much fanfare. If you’re in a masochistic mood you can have a go on it right here.
When I saw they’d automatically applied it to my website I was quite excited, but that quickly gave way to frustration and wonderment at how they could replace the previous editor with something so clunky and haywire.
Then I searched “disable Gutenberg” in the WordPress plugin store and activated the plugin that came up.
Since then I’ve had to use Gutenberg a few times on client websites. No matter how much time I spend with it, I can’t over the feeling that it’s less useful and more frustrating than the editor it replaced.
Here’s why:
- It strips code for no apparent reason
- It’s unnecessarily difficult to select multiple blocks which makes copying and pasting an ordeal
- The formatting popup gets in the way of content – this used to live nice and neatly, out of the way at the top of the editor
- It jumps around constantly when you’re trying to edit stuff 👇
- It doesn’t let you resize videos…
Today I was delighted to learn that you can disable Gutenberg with a simple bit of code in your site’s functions.php file:
add_filter('use_block_editor_for_post', '__return_false', 10);Simply paste that into the file, hit save, and say goodbye to Gutenberg forever 👋
I hope this is useful for at least one other person who doesn’t get along with this clunky, inefficient tool!
