WordPress Custom Fields Missing When ACF is Active

When the plugin ACF or ACF Pro 5.6.0 is active the native WordPress Custom Fields on post, pages or CPTs is not visible and gone missing. If you disable the ACF plugin the custom fields are visible again.

acf-wordpress-missing-custom-fields

The functionality to hide the WordPress custom fields was introduced in ACF version 5.5.13 but then made default in 5.6.0, it was made default to speed up the page speed  load of the admin edit page/post screen.

To reverse this behaviour you can add in your functions.php

 add_filter('acf/settings/remove_wp_meta_box', '__return_false');

Now the custom fields will be visible again.

6 Comments

  1. Deepak Rawat on June 5, 2021 at 12:21 pm

    That was a life saver piece of code, wow !

  2. Toni on February 28, 2020 at 1:09 pm

    Thanks so much – it was a problem for me, as I was manually copying and pasting all my product data from the WP fields to ACF, and needed to see them both in the editing screen!
    Saved me some headaches.

  3. Pradip Thigale on December 24, 2018 at 9:38 am

    Thanks a lot

  4. Paul Lacey on September 16, 2017 at 11:47 pm

    Thank you, I needed this just last week on a site where I had used the *Custom Code* plugin (to embed ISSUU embed code into a BB page where the Firewall was blocking unfiltered HTML on the front end.
    Adding this to the site, and to my Gists. Thanks (again!)

  5. Patrick Fortino on September 16, 2017 at 4:23 pm

    Thanks!. I had the same problem with custom fields from another plugin. Couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t see them if ACF was active.

    • Neil Gowran on September 16, 2017 at 11:48 pm

      Yep stumped me for a while

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