Why unicode emojis in wordpress displayed with <img> tag?

Question

In wordpress when I use a unicode emoji like "😑" or others, wordpress convert emoji character to <img> tag with src="emoji.svg" and alt="😑" like this:

<img draggable="false" class="emoji" alt="😑" src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/11/svg/1f611.svg">

Imagine I want to use 50 emoji in a text, this is very bad in SEO and for site performance. Is there a way to keep the emoji as unicode? Like here on Stack Overflow and other websites?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

There is a great answer here on wordpress development that tells you how to disable the svg styled icons, its this line:

add_filter( 'emoji_svg_url', '__return_false' );

Also check out the other hooks that you might need to fully disable emojis.

Wordpress uses svg emojis for two reasons I think:

1. Their emojis are more "flat" and therefore look more modern
2. When being used as images, emojis can have different sizes than the text sourrounding them.