When a string passed to the esc_url() and esc_url_raw() functions does not include a protocol (https://, http://, etc.), WordPress will prepend http:// to the URL string before further processing and returning it. This is a reasonable fallback behavior, but there is currently no way to override the default protocol with another (such as https:// for … Continue reading URL-escaping functions can support HTTPS as the default protocol in WordPress 6.9