Recently, Facebook announced that unauthenticated oEmbed Endpoints will be deprecated on October 24, 2020. If you have previously embedded Facebook or Instagram posts, videos, images, etc. on your WordPress website through the default oEmbed or Embed blocks feature, once the change rolls out, they will not function properly.

This change can potentially affect millions of WordPress users. As a hosting provider that offers fully managed WordPress hosting solutions, we always strive to keep our clients updated. Therefore, we want to bring a little bit of light on how to properly deal with the upcoming change and take on-time actions before causing issues on their websites.

In this blog post, we will explain how that change will affect WordPress users, how to fix your already embedded content, and how to properly embed Facebook and Instagram content in the future.

What will this change lead to

The API requests for embedding Facebook and Instagram content are at the backbone of both WordPress Editors – Gutenberg and the Classic Editor. Hence, in response to this upcoming change, WordPress announced that they will be removing Facebook and Instagram oEmbed endpoints from the WordPress Core in one of their upcoming update releases. Until now, WordPress automatically converted all your Facebook and Instagram content into oEmbeds.

oEmbed is a format that allows content from a particular website to be embedded and displayed on another website. The API allows users to embed HTML and basic metadata of content, such as pages, posts, and videos without parsing the resource directly.

Put in simple words, if no actions are taken before the rollout, all unauthenticated Facebook and Instagram embeds will appear broken.

Before oEmbeds deprecation:

After oEmbeds deprecation:

How to fix your Embeds

Counted from the 24th of October 2020, all WordPress users will be required to create a Facebook developer account, register a Facebook App, add the oEmbed Product to the App, have an Access Token, and have the Facebook App in Live Mode. We are sure that sounds extremely complicated for most WordPress users. Fortunately, the great community that stands behind WordPress has taken ahead-of-time actions to provide a simple solution when the oEmbed support is dropped. There are a couple of plugins already available that we will recommend you consider.

Smash Balloon Plugins

Smash Balloon is a WordPress plugin development company concentrated on creating plugins intended for seamless and customizable social media content displaying. Their free Custom Facebook Feed and Instagram Feed plugins will allow you to fix your already embedded content and easily embed new posts, images, and videos. If you need instructions on how to install WordPress plugins, please make sure to either check our installation guide or submit a ticket request from your HostArmada Client Area. You can find detailed instructions for the plugin setup at their official Custom Facebook Feed configuration and Instagram Feed configuration guides.

oEmbed Plus

Another alternative is the oEmbed Plus plugin developed by  Ayesh Karunaratne.  While this plugin will still require a Facebook developer account and a Facebook App, it still makes things a lot simpler. You can find detailed instructions on the configuration in their oEmbed Plus guide.

We sincerely hope the information provided in this post helped you take on-time actions to prevent the unpleasant consequences of the oEmbed Endpoints support drop. Even if you did not manage to fix your embeds before the rollout, the plugins mentioned above will do the magic, so there is no reason to panic. In case you are a HostArmada client and you face any difficulties, you are always welcome to contact our techies, who will be more than happy to help you out.