Text editor extremely slow

I have also noticed that since updating WordPress, when typing a post in text editor mode, it is painfully slow.

Sometimes I can finish typing whole sentences before the first letter of the first word appears on the screen.

It’s not my computer, my computer is very fast and it’s a clean install of Chrome, so no bugs there. I’m convinced it’s WordPress.

Very annoying.

I have now worked out the culprit. It is the stupid introduction by WordPress of Emoji support which loads scripts and who knows what else.

I copied and pasted the code at the following link into my WordPress theme’s functions.php file and the text editor now works a treat, just like it used to:

http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/185577/disable-emojicons-introduced-with-wp-4-2

Those with less technical ability, the code at that page disables Emoji support – and stops the scripts etc loading, it is not harmful to your site in any way whatsoever.

If you’re not able or condfident to edit your functions.php file, I suggest you install a plugin to disable Emoji which will do exactly the same thing as copying and pasting that code into your theme’s functions.php file.

Here is one you may wish to install: https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-emojis/

I’m confident you will be able to use the text editor without any latency after that.

It’s a shame WP released this version with a bug (it’s a shame they introduced Emoji support in the first place in my opinion) but even if they don’t come up with a fix for it, disabling Emoji support is no bad thing – it slows down page loading times among other things.

Good riddance to it I say! I hope my post helps somebody!

James Huff, I’m not sure what you mean by this:

It’s not a bug, the editor shouldn’t be operating slowly

The fact that the editor is operating slowly is, surely, a bug. No? Not just for me but for others too.

What else can we do to “troubleshoot to isolate the problem”?

I would be quite willing to help, but as far as troubleshooting goes, I’ve disabled Emoji – sorry – “support for native Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters” and the bug – yes, bug – has now gone away.

Samuel Wood, I never suggested it was anything to do with my or salromano’s theme.

The functions.php file doesn’t just affect theme issues, it is a way of disabling this new facility which has caused the text editor to be too slow to be used. It was a trade-off which was worth it because out blogs were unworkable without it.

And although it may not have sorted the issue, it has allowed the text editor to work again.

Oh, and this new functionality does add extra load – unnecessary load in many cases – with the extra scripts.

Well, thank you James. I have done what you have suggested – deleted this workaround code from my functions.php…

…I have then disabled all plugins…

..then I deleted everything else in my functions.php that may have affected the issue (including javascript calls)…

…then I removed everything I had added to my site’s .htaccess other than the WP standard code…

…and several permutations of the above steps, and the latency in text editor mode still remained.

However, every time I tested this (after hard refreshing in Chrome developer mode) the (unpublished) blog article I was testing it on was in a pretty long post I had been drafting – over 2,600 words.

I don’t know why, but I thought I would test editing a shorter blog post I had published some time ago – one with only 380 words – and, would you believe, it did not have this problem.

So I went through various old posts, and this is what I found:

Post which had 3,673 words – problem persisted

Post which had 4,491 words – problem persisted

Post which had 639 words – no problem

Post which has 932 words – problem persisted

Post which has 264 words – no problem

So, this is somewhat scientific but in some ways not, but there seems to me to be a link between the amount of words in a post and this latency in the text editor.

Please be aware that I always, without fail, compose my posts in text mode, and not everybody does. Not everybody writes long articles either, so it may be more widespread than people realise.

To be sure, I have also switched to visual editor mode in long articles and short ones and have never experienced the latency.

I have also installed and activated the latest version of TwentyFifteen and the problem persisted.

So, from my investigation, I can conclude: I am experiencing severe latency in text editor mode (and text editor mode only, not visual mode) which only affects longer articles, and this problem only manifested itself after WordPress introduced emoji/Asian character support, and goes away if emoji is disabled via plugin.

Now that sounds like a bug to me, but I am prepared to accept that it isn’t! Please could you give me your thoughts?

Oh, and I will install the plugin and not keep that code in my functions.php file, if it will make you happy! 🙂

I forgot to include in my post, but edited it just before you responded, that I tried testing it on TwentyFifteen and the problem still persisted.

I have done what you suggest, and used Lipsum text, and cannot replicate the problem in either TwentyFifteen or my own theme.

I tried up to 16,000 (yes, sixteen thousand) words of Lipsum and cannot replicate the problem.

Yet as soon as I pasted the 2,665 words of my draft post onto the end of those 16,000 LipSum words, the problem arose – without me even having to ‘save draft’ and refresh the page.

Then I re-deleted that draft post text I had pasted, and the problem went away – again, without having to press ‘save draft’.

I think we’re getting closer to identifying the problem, but I’ll be darned if I can work it out myself!