How To Open External Links in a New Tab in Wordpress

Don’t you hate when you’re reading someone’s blog post and you click on one of their links – and it takes you away from their site and the blog post you were in the middle of reading?

Grrrr. I do!

That’s why I want EVERYONE with a WordPress site to know how to create external links that open a new tab.

First off, let’s make sure we’re on the same page by defining what is considered an external link.

What is an external link?

An External Link is any link that goes to a different domain outside of your own domain.

Need a real life example? Let’s start with my blog post, “How 8 Bloggers Are Making Thousands Every Month”. If you go to this post, you’ll see that I created external links to each of the bloggers I shared – links that are going to domains that are not yourmarketingbff.

Now click on one of the links, do you see what happens? A new window/tab opens up.

Why do this?

It allows readers to click on your external links, but still keep your site/the original tab open. This makes it easy for the reader to come right back and pick up where they left off on your site.

How To Open External Links In A New Tab In WordPress

In WordPress, every time an author wants to add a link in a post they have the option to ‘open link in a new window/tab’ manually. What? Where?

Step 1: Highlight the word or words that you want to link.
Step 2: Click on ‘insert/edit link’ icon.
Step 3: A quick pop up appears, click on the ‘link options’ gear icon.
Step 4: Put a check in the box ‘Open link in a new window/tab’.
Step 5: Add the destination url and click on the blue ‘add link’ button.