Prevent Automatic Link Insertion When Composing

  • Unknown's avatar
    zeldatriforcefan · Member ·

    This is a continuation from the thread here by another individual – https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/prevent-automatic-link-insertion-when-composing/

    I too have this issue that has been bothering me for months and there seems to be no way to solve it. To keep this short, the text I am using on my page is lastminute.com – the travel website. No https/http/www. is used in the text, just the phrase lastminute.com

    In the visual editor this is plain paragraph text. You cannot remove/break the URL via the Visual editor because it is not seen shown as a URL. It only turns into a URL when you save/update the page.

    If you click on the text editor there is no hyperlink code to remove because it was never made into a link, and in the visual editor it is again – plain paragraph text.

    But regardless of what you do anything on the page it will be a URL on the live website. If you try to break the word for example – last minute.com – “minute.com” will be a URL.

    This is extremely annoying because I deal with ecommerce brands on my website and many have .com or .co.uk in their actual name – not just the domain. And you of course use the brand names repeatedly. As well as in headings.

    So this bug, or whatever it is makes them an active link. This was not happening last year, so it has happened in a change to WordPress at some point this year.

    Can this ever be fixed?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-calvinkantes · Staff ·

    Hello there,

    I tested typing lastminute.com in a paragraph block, and I was not able to replicate it. I only see a link on the live site when “www” or “https://” is added to the text.

    However, if you are still experiencing this, as a workaround, you can use the in-line code feature to ensure the link remains a text, regardless of the format. You can add an in-line code by adding a quotation mark at the beginning and end of the word. You can also highlight the word and select an in-line code from the dropdown.


  • Unknown's avatar
    zeldatriforcefan · Member ·

    Hi Calvin,

    Thanks for your reply. I have a custom theme (our own) that uses the classic editor. I don’t have this option unfortunately for the inline code unless I install a plugin to give extra functionality. I can add <p><code>lastminute.com</code></p> via the text editor and this removes the active link but changes the format of the text – well it adds a grey box behind the text.

    But this also affects parts of the page that is populated via a template from a .php file. We add text into a field via backend through a User profile (for example lastminute.com) and it populates part of the page from the Nickname to show text on the front end.

    But it is also happening in the content box that uses the classic editor. It’s annoying as it of course makes the text turn blue and is an obvious hyperlink and there could be 20+ links now on these types of pages where the brand has .com etc in their name. That also probably isn’t any good for on-page SEO.

    It doesn’t look like then there is an easy solution. Like I mentioned previously, this never used to happen. But for some reason now WordPress chooses to make any word with an extension into a link – like the guy was saying in the previous thread. This even includes adding brand contact details to the page, so for example support(at)lastminute.com. well the part after @ will be made a link.

    Thanks for your help.

  • Unknown's avatar
    tanjoymor · Member ·

    Hi there, Not sure if this works, but I found this option: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/336135/how-can-i-avoid-auto-linking-of-urls :

    That said, in going through your site of https://www.lastminute.com/ I wasn’t able to find any instances of lastminute.com that was showing has a hyperlink. For example, I see this in Chrome: https://cln.sh/s5xgLlj2 and it’s not clickable.

    I’ve also tested on my own WordPress.com sites, and I can’t get any URL to link automatically when there’s no http or www included. I have to manually add the link. So I’m quite curious about this.

    As a test, could you go to this page: https://tanyajones.ca/about-me/ and tell us if the “WordPress.com” text in the first paragraph is a hyperlink for you? It’s not for me: https://cln.sh/tqysY56W – I’ve tested this in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, all on a Mac.

    Also, none of those URLs are auto-linking on this page for me either: https://cln.sh/39GKtCdy, and this forum is using WordPress. So I’m not sure that what you’re encountering is a “WordPress” thing, though I’m not sure what could be causing it. But maybe the suggestion above will work for you?

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