When creating or editing a WordPress post or page, a user has the option to choose the visual editor (using TinyMCE) or text (the source code).

One of my websites, with a clean WordPress installation and no plugins, decided to not show the visual editor buttons. So, I could only use the text editor. There were the things I tried:

• Changing the theme to the default one
• Removing query string from static sources
• Adding define(‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false); to wp-config.php
• Replacing the TinyMCE folder with a fresh copy
• Replacing the wp-admin and wp-includes folders with new ones

Nothing seemed to help: the issue was still there.

I use CloudFlare (a DNS provider) and while editing this WordPress site, I enabled Development Mode. According to CloudFlare:

Status: Development Mode. Caching for this website has been disabled.

However, apparently, CloudFlare was still serving cached files. Since I got an error a a .css and .js file with a query string attached to it (?ver=1.2.3), I figured I would try to change the caching level.

So I change from Standard (“Delivers a different resource each time the query string changes.”) to Ignore Query String (“Delivers the same resource to everyone independent of the query string.”) for this particular domain.

Solved! After clearing cache and cookies, the visual editor showed up again.