You could create a shortcode that wraps the passed filename in to a proper download link. For example, entering “[down]big-image-for-download.jpg[/down]” could be expanded into
<a href="https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/big-image-for-download.jpg" class="download-link" download >Download</a>
https://codex.wordpress.org/Shortcode_API
was hoping to not have to code anything. Is there another way to do this? BTW in my original question, the “Click to download” link was supposed to be an anchor tag like the one bcworkz had in his reply. Why does wordpress strip out the “download” parameter? That would make it simple.
I don’t see how you can get by without some sort of code to make this work. Another option (which escaped my thought earlier) would be to use the ‘wp_kses_allowed_html’ filter to add download to the list of allowed anchor tag attributes. Then you can enter your download HTML normally and WP will not strip it out.
Only allowing specific attributes is a security measure to help protect your visitors in case malicious code should somehow find its way onto your site. While there is not much of a security risk in download by itself, combined with other techniques, a visitor could be tricked into doing something risky to their own computer.
