One of the major features that the recent release of WordPress version 4.4 introduced is the ability to embed WordPress posts.
Your blog posts from a WordPress powered website can now be embedded in other WordPress blogs.
Although this might be exciting to many of us, you might be considering to disable this feature for various reasons.
The WordPress core developers team believe that the feature is very useful for the majority of the users and that only a few of the WordPress users might want to disable it.
What are WordPress post Embeds?
You might be already familiar with embedding videos (from Youtube) or tweets from Twitter within your blog posts by just pasting the URL.
This is made possible by oEmbeds, a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites.
WordPress has supported oEmbeds for websites starting with version 2.9. Adding to the existing list of more than 30+ oembed supported websites, WordPress 4.4 has added support for five more websites including Cloudup, Reddit Comments, ReverbNation, Speaker Deck, and VideoPress.
Similar to the above websites, with WordPress 4.4, your WordPress blog becomes oEmbed provider by default.
Your posts thus can be embedded in any other WordPress blogs or by oEmbed consumers.
One can just paste the URL of your post, and WordPress will automatically generate a nicely formatted content cards including your post’s title, excerpt, featured image (if available), site icon and links for comments and sharing.
You can see the preview below for one of the posts of WPism.
Why Disable WordPress Post Embeds?
It’s very early to predict if WordPress users like or dislike this feature, but there are certainly users out there who don’t want to implement this feature.
You might have several reasons to disable this but a few reasons that I guess why you want to disable this feature include;
- It might affect the performance of your website if some popular website or many other websites embed your content.
- More bandwidth usage and thus high hosting server costs.
Steps to Disable Post embeds in WordPress
Although there is no option in settings by default to disable this feature, it’s pretty easy to disable the feature.
- Install the Disable embeds plugin from the WordPress plugins repository. (Go to Plugins > Add New and search for “disable embeds” to install directly from your dashboard)
- Click on “Install Now” button to install the Disable Embeds plugin.
- Once installed, click “Activate Plugin“.
There’re no additional settings for the plugin, and this should disable the embeds feature for your WordPress posts.
Your View on post Embeds
Personally, I am not sure yet if I like this feature for WPism. I have already seen several content-farm websites embedding posts from WPism.
Sure, it might be good for some personal blogs with less traffic but if you are serious about your website performance and want to save your expensive server resources, you might want to rethink the value of the feature.
What’s your view on the WordPress post embeds? Do you think it’s one of the essential functionalities for most of the users or wished to have a default option to turn it off?
Thanks, is this really the only way to turn that off? I like the look of the embeds, but when writing a longer blog it distracts from actual reading the post. I would not only like to see a feature implemented in core to de-activate, but also change how it looks. If I get an option to choose between different layouts / sizes I could imagine using it more, right now it is not useful and only working for a part of the sites I am linking to.
That plugin not update anymore… don’t stop oembeds. Try it instead: https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-embeds-littlebizzy/