How to disable WordPress’ Gutenberg editor without a plugin

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:

1. It strips code for no apparent reason
2. It’s unnecessarily difficult to select multiple blocks which makes copying and pasting an ordeal
3. 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
4. It jumps around constantly when you’re trying to edit stuff 👇
5. 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!