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

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

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