The WordPress block editor became extremely slow on a site using Toolset Types, especially when editing posts with very large custom taxonomies (some with 1,000+ terms). Actions like opening the media library, selecting a featured image, or interacting with taxonomy fields caused long delays (30–60 seconds), making normal content editing impractical. Disabling Toolset Types restored performance, confirming the issue was related to how large taxonomies were rendered in the editor.
Solution:
The performance issue was resolved by changing large custom taxonomies from checkbox-style (category-like) inputs to tag-style (autocomplete) inputs. Checkbox-style taxonomy UIs attempt to load and render all terms in the editor, which becomes extremely slow with large term counts. Tag-style taxonomies use an autocomplete input instead, dramatically reducing the amount of data loaded in the editor. After switching most taxonomies to the tag-like format, editor performance improved significantly and editing became fast and usable again.
AJAX auto-update for Toolset View search filters (update results when inputs change) was not working on an archive page. The search worked only when using a Search button (non-AJAX submit), even though the View’s Custom Search settings and AJAX pagination settings appeared correct.
Solution:
The issue was caused by the theme deregistering WordPress’ jQuery using wp_deregister_script('jquery') and loading its own jQuery directly. This removed the jquery script handle that Toolset depends on. As a result, Toolset’s frontend.js was not initialized and AJAX events did not fire when filter inputs changed.
Fix: remove the deregister logic and restore the standard WordPress approach by using wp_enqueue_script('jquery'). After that, Toolset AJAX filtering worked normally.
