Disable WordPress Block Widget! How to do it in 5 seconds + instructions

Disable WordPress block widget, turn it off, whatever, get rid of it! We’re not big fans of the new WordPress UI changes. Even the Gutenberg editor was no solala (hint: we’re about to disable that too). Many in e-commerce use WordPress or the WooCommerce extension and may be facing the exact same problem today! With the WordPress 5.8 update, the new “Block Widget” editor just came. Update done, look into the widgets: What happened! You see error after error! What to do? Go back to the default! With this, simple trick.

Disable block widget

If you already know your way around WordPress, paste this code into your theme editor.

If you don’t have any experience with it yet, after the codes we have a simple 4 step guide with screenshots for you.

Disable block widget

With this line, you can disable the block widgets:

Disables the block editor from managing widgets.
add_filter( ‘use_widgets_block_editor’, ‘__return_false’ );

Source: WP Code US

Speaking of which, you can use this to disable the “new” Gutenberg editor.

Disable Gutenberg Editor

Disable Gutenberg Editor:

Disables the block editor from managing widgets in the Gutenberg plugin.
add_filter( ‘gutenberg_use_widgets_block_editor’, ‘__return_false’ );

Error: Before / After

Here’s a quick recap of the error you either already have on your WordPress system or will get after updating to WordPress 5.8.

Before: Widget work as always

Update: WordPress 5.8

Then comes your update to version 5.8.

After update: Error over error

After the update, depending on the plugins, error after error. With Multilingual (eg WPML) in e-commerce, it becomes quite extreme. Also, “legacy” texts attaching everywhere, for privacy. To each, individual widget. If you’re not just managing 1 site, but maybe 5, 10 or 20, you’ll want to get back to standard, fast.

What now? This is how you insert the code (above)!

Solution: Code for Theme Editor

Open the “Theme Editor” in the menu. Here you add this code to your “functions.php” as shown in the screenshot.