Wordpress 5: prevent link from displaying page title instead of URL

Question

I noticed in one of the updates since wordpress 5 that when I paste in a link to another site it shows the page title as the hyperlink (usually "Home") instead of the URL. I don't want that, I want the actual URL as is.

what I put in the editor

what I get in the visual editor and on the page display:

Answer 1

Since v4.4 oEmbed feature was merged into core. This allows users to embed YouTube videos, tweets and many other resources on their sites simply by pasting a URL, which WordPress automatically converts into an embed and provides a live preview in the visual editor.

Option 1

You can remove the oembed functionality by adding this to your functions.php

function disable_embeds_init() {
    remove_shortcode( 'embed' );
    remove_filter( 'the_content', [ $GLOBALS['wp_embed'], 'autoembed' ], 8 );
    remove_filter( 'the_content', [ $GLOBALS['wp_embed'], 'run_shortcode' ], 8 );
    remove_action( 'edit_form_advanced', [ $GLOBALS['wp_embed'], 'maybe_run_ajax_cache' ] );
}
add_action( 'init', 'disable_embeds_init', 9999 );

Source wp-includes/class-wp-embed.php

Option 2

Alternatively you could use the wp_dequeue_script function to remove the wp-embed:

function my_deregister_scripts(){
   wp_dequeue_script( 'wp-embed' );
}
add_action( 'wp_footer', 'my_deregister_scripts' );

Option 3

For a complete oEmbed removal you can use the code below:

function disable_embeds_code_init() {
 remove_action( 'rest_api_init', 'wp_oembed_register_route' );
 add_filter( 'embed_oembed_discover', '__return_false' );
 remove_filter( 'oembed_dataparse', 'wp_filter_oembed_result', 10 );
 remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_oembed_add_discovery_links' );
 remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_oembed_add_host_js' );
 add_filter( 'tiny_mce_plugins', 'disable_embeds_tiny_mce_plugin' );
 add_filter( 'rewrite_rules_array', 'disable_embeds_rewrites' );
 remove_filter( 'pre_oembed_result', 'wp_filter_pre_oembed_result', 10 );
}
add_action( 'init', 'disable_embeds_code_init', 9999 );

function disable_embeds_tiny_mce_plugin($plugins) {
    return array_diff($plugins, array('wpembed'));
}

function disable_embeds_rewrites($rules) {
    foreach($rules as $rule => $rewrite) {
        if(false !== strpos($rewrite, 'embed=true')) {
            unset($rules[$rule]);
        }
    }
    return $rules;
}

Note: code sourced from Disable Embeds plugin