If you’ve used WordPress long enough, you already know the platform loves to inject… well, stuff into your pages. Emoji scripts, Gutenberg styles, shortlinks, obscure discovery tags from 2005 — and about 47 other things you never asked for.

Fortunately, developer Terence Eden got fed up with seeing his site’s source code turn into a spaghetti bowl and decided to compile a list of everything you can safely strip out.

The result? A dramatically cleaner WordPress install — and a much faster site.

WordPress: “Decisions, Not Options”… for Better or Worse

WordPress follows a philosophy called “Decisions, not options.”
Meaning: instead of letting site owners choose what they want, WordPress decides for you.

Which would be fine — except many of those baked-in decisions enable features most users don’t need.

And some of them are downright ridiculous.

The Emoji Script You Never Needed

WordPress loads:

• an emoji detection script
• an emoji stylesheet

on every single page of your site.

Why?
Because if you type a colon + parenthesis :-) in an article, WordPress thinks you want it transformed into a glossy emoji.

But in 2025, everyone already uses real Unicode emojis anyway. And in RSS feeds, WordPress even replaces emojis automatically.

It’s pointless bloat — and yes, you can remove it.

Automatic Formatting You Didn’t Ask For

WordPress also adds its own “smart formatting”:

wptexturize:

Turns “straight quotes” into “curly quotes.”

capital_P_dangit:

Automatically corrects “Wordpress” to “WordPress.”

Yes — WordPress silently fixes the capitalization of its own name inside your content.
It’s as petty as it sounds.

Gutenberg Styles Everywhere… Even If You Don’t Use Gutenberg

Even if you’ve proudly stuck with the Classic Editor, WordPress still loads:

• global Gutenberg styles
• block library styles
• widget block editor styles

None of these help your site if you’re not using the block editor. They just add weight and slow down page loads.

Bloated Metadata: Tags You’ll Never Need

View your site’s HTML head and you’ll probably find tons of auto-inserted tags, such as:

• shortlinks
• RSD (Real Simple Discovery — from 2003!)
• comment feed links
• REST API discovery links
• JSON API output

Most sites don’t use any of this. Yet WordPress injects all of it by default.

“Flush This Junk”: What Terence Eden’s Script Removes

Eden’s cleanup script disables a huge set of unnecessary features, including:

• automatic sizes attributes for images (wp_img_tag_add_auto_sizes)
• attachment template generation
• block hooks that alter your content
• Gutenberg styles
• emoji scripts
• legacy metadata

It puts you back in control of what WordPress outputs — not the other way around.

Even better: with this cleanup in place, Eden’s site scores exceptionally high on Google PageSpeed Insights, proving the extra bloat truly isn’t needed.

His full script (about 190 lines of commented PHP) is available on GitLab so you can enable or disable features as you see fit.

A Warning: Don’t Disable Everything Blindly

Some features are required depending on your setup.

Examples:

• If a plugin uses the REST API → you must keep the REST links.
• If you rely on Gutenberg → don’t remove block styles.
• If you publish via remote tools → you may need RSD or XML-RPC.

The smart approach: disable one feature at a time and test your site carefully.

Final Thoughts

WordPress is powerful, flexible, and endlessly customizable — but it comes with years of accumulated cruft that most websites simply don’t need. With a little cleanup, you can dramatically reduce page weight, improve performance, and take control of what your CMS actually outputs.

Eden’s script proves something important:
fast, clean WordPress sites are absolutely possible — you just need to declutter the defaults.