App to Disable WordPress Native Functions
There are several native WordPress features that fell out of use naturally, or became loopholes bloggers would want to plug, or became the subject of privacy regulations. WordPress is a strong platform that enables much of the extra toppings that, in my opinion, at the time sounded like interesting social media features.
Disabler is an open source plugin that is free to use. It’s literally focused on disabling unnecessary WordPress features. In theory, you could use multiple disabling plugins instead; however, overhead alone from running multiple plugins could be a nuisance. Disabler is all-in-one on-off switches for popular (i.e. to be turned off) choices.
My list of features that need to be turned off would be following:
- Internal self Trackbacks and Pingbacks
- Internal shortened links
- Emojis (GDPR-related issue)
- External embed (performance and traffic)
- Control Heartbeat (performance)
I would highly recommend disabling emojis, as the integration of emojis into WordPress system is in legal grey area. Emoji related requests already pose a possible privacy issue, going back to GDPR. I ended up disabling self pingbacks and shortened links after dealing with inconsistent behaviors how WordPress was handling them automatically. Fixing them manually got out hand at some point. As for the embed and heartbeat, I am trying to optimize the system resources as much as I can. There are other options too, but those are the ones I would recommend off the bat.