Faster load times!
I’m very excited to share with you a new setting that can drastically speed up the load times of the post edit page! It is called remove_wp_meta_box, and when set to true
, it will remove the WP Custom Fields meta box (basic custom field inputs).
Although simple in it’s operation, removing this metabox (via the remove_meta_box()
function) has a profound affect on the page’s load time!
The speed boost is achieved by preventing an expensive SQL query in the WP meta_form() function that loads available custom field options in the select dropdown. If you are interested to know more about the SQL, checkout the source code. All credit must go to the very helpful Alexandre Plennevaux who notified me of this issue!
This setting will currently default to false
allowing WP to continue loading the Custom Fields metabox, however, I would like to change this default to true
in the near future. Please be sure to add the following code to your site to test it out and be sure to tweet me @wp_acf to share your thoughts!
functions.php

add_filter('acf/settings/remove_wp_meta_box', '__return_true');
Changelog
- Clone field: Improved ‘Fields’ setting to show all fields within a matching field group search
- Flexible Content field: Fixed bug causing ‘layout_title’ filter to fail when field is cloned
- Flexible Content field: Added missing ‘translate_field’ function
- WYSIWYG field: Fixed JS error when using CKEditor plugin
- Date Picker field: Improved ‘Display Format’ and ‘Return Format’ settings UI
- Time Picker field: Same as above
- Datetime Picker field: Same as above
- Core: Added new ‘remove_wp_meta_box’ setting
- Core: Added constants ACF, ACF_PRO, ACF_VERSION and ACF_PATH
- Core: Improved compatibility with Select2 v4 including sortable functionality
- Language: Updated Portuguese translation – thanks to Pedro Mendonça
Details
- Radio button ‘other’ choice label can now be defined in the field’s ‘choices’ and will appear before the text input
- Added
is_dir()
check when loading a local JSON folder - Improved
load_plugin_textdomain()
logic to better mimic WP – will not load from the ‘languages’ directory first, then from the plugin - Removed a recent tinymce
z-index
CSS fix as this caused more issues than it solved