A client reached out to me asking to get one of their websites to look like the other when they add new blog posts. Both sites use Elementor, but one was set to use the WordPress content editor (classic editor, which they prefer) and the new site was using Elementor for posts, which they did not like.

Upon digging in, I started off by disabling Elementor on the built-in Post type and installing Classic Editor. I was a bit closer, but the Visual and Text tabs were missing from the WordPress WYSIWYG editor. You’ll notice in the photo below that the editor looks familiar, but for someone who doesn’t know HTML it would be very difficult to format the posts to their liking.

This was a first for me, so I started disabling plugins down to only Elementor and Elementor Pro active, but that didn’t fix it. I found guides online to replace the TinyMCE files in wp-includes/js which I did, but that didn’t fix it.

Another fix that didn’t work for me was to add define(‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false ); to your wp-config file and also to increase the tinymce scripts priority as a code snippet in functions.php, which also did not work.

I even changed PHP versions on their hosting, but that didn’t work either.

Finally, I stumbled across an article that showed a tiny little tick box I wasn’t aware of in your User profile page:

The fix for me was to simply tick the highlighted box (Disable the visual editor when writing), update my profile, then untick the box, update my profile again, and sure enough, the Visual and Text tabs are both now available on Posts for this site.

What a simple little thing that took me longer than I care to admit to find out. Credit to Bruce C’s comment here: https://wpmantis.com/fix-missing-visual-and-text-tabs-in-pagepost-editor/ 

I hope this helps if you run across this issue in the future!