Custom field for custom permalinks

I guess I need some hand-holding with this–

The PageLinksTo plugin is 100% brilliant, but cannot be integrated into Gravity Forms, so I have had to go the manual route.

That said, I’ve tried various instructions, but I am obviously missing something.

The posts have permalinks that are only taking the first letter of the custom field value, so instead of taking me to https://www.link.com, they direct me to thecinnamonquill.com/testblog/w (and I have tried doing ‘https://’ but then I am taken to /h).

(See ex at: https://thecinnamonquill.com/testblog/ )

In order to get to this point, I did the following:

Custom field created, name= external-link, value=www.anylink.com

Code added to loop.php + functions.php.

So my loop.php looks like this: https://pastebin.com/SPKpPgT3

My functions.php: https://pastebin.com/t3hVnzKh

What am I missing or what is happening here?

Sorry for the trouble + thanks for the insight!