(Temporarily) Disable a shortcode in WordPress

Published: February 26, 2026 by Matze – Leave a comment

When I was working on schema data, I got an issue where a shortcode was executed within that data, which was not desired. So I looked for a way to disable this particular shortcode temporarily. I didn’t want to disable all shortcodes, which would have been easier by just removing the do_shortcode function within my code, because I was dependent on other shortcodes.

The idea

WordPress stores all registered shortcodes within the global variable $shortcode_tags. The idea was to remove the particular shortcode from this variable (which is an array with the name of the shortcodes as key), execute my code and then re-adding the shortcode again to make sure it works in the subsequent code. And this worked.

In practice

The code looks like this:

global $shortcode_tags;

// we don't want to execute the grw shortcode here
if ( isset( $shortcode_tags['grw'] ) ) {
	$ignored_shortcode = $shortcode_tags['grw'];
	unset( $shortcode_tags['grw'] );
}

// do stuff

if ( isset( $ignored_shortcode ) ) {
	$shortcode_tags['grw'] = $ignored_shortcode; // phpcs:ignore WordPress.WP.GlobalVariablesOverride.Prohibited
}
Code language: PHP (php)

In my case, the problematic shortcode was called grw, that’s why the key is named like this. If it is available, I store it in a dedicated variable and remove it from $shortcode_tags (lines 4 – 7). Then I execute my code that requires this shortcode to be removed (line 9) and re-add it later, if the dedicated variable has been set (lines 11 – 13).