WordPress: How to remove the wlwmanifest and EditURI/RSD Link Element

After updating my sites to the latest version of WordPress, I decided to get rid of non-important elements from the head section.

The first element I saw was the wlwmanifest link element. But before I removed it, I searched on the internet, to find out why this element is used.

Both wlwmanifest and EditURI/RSD link elements are needed if you are using some desktop blog post publishing software. An example of such software is: Windows Live Writer

And I believe that the mentioned link elements are used for the Tagging Support in such softwares:

Do you use any desktop software to publish posts to your blog?

If you don’t, then you may think about removing these elements from the head section.

In order to do this, you need to edit the functions.php file: which you can find in your Currently Used Theme folder.

In the functions.php file, add the below mentioned code before the PHP closing tags “?>”:

remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');

Save the file and then reload/refresh your site and check the source code. You should now see both of the mentioned link elements being removed.