Dang that Invisible Visual Editor that refuses to Work!
Over the last few months there have been a number of complaints about the visual editor not appearing. This also applies to people who suddenly open up pages and posts just to see all their content missing in visual but perfectly intact in the text editor. So I am hoping that some troubleshooting options will be helpful for anyone experiencing these problems.
Unfortunately, many of use prefer to work with the visual editor as it makes it significantly easier to format your post without having to know any html (which is required to do fancy things in the text editor)
In case you aren't sure what you are looking at
Visual Editor
Text Editor
As you can see the options in each tab look every different. Quite a few of us, myself included, just do not work well in text mode, especially for any kind of extended period of time.
So it is of top priority to get the visual editor back when it decides to stop working for whatever reason.
Prevention Tip
Judebanks was kind enough to offer a tip in the comments on something that might prevent your visual editor from vanishing in the future. Figured it couldn't hurt to mention it here since some people have reoccurring problems.
When you are done working on your site for the day, close all your website tabs and go back to the main area of your Wordpress Dashboard and log out from there. Don't log out while in one of the editors (I know i have been guilty of this). Just an easy habit to get into that might prevent you from having issues in the future.
Now back to the topic at hand! - Missing Editor
Just to start,trying logging out of your site for a few minutes and logging back in. This happened to work for someone yesterday in live chat. Definitely an easy solution to the problem.
For anyone else that is not so lucky with this technique...
TIME TO GET TROUBLESHOOTING!
***SIDE NOTE - Wordpress does have a troubleshooting option that involves adding some stuff to a .php file. I have left that out as I don't think its a good idea to go messing around with parts of the code unless they know 100% what they are doing.