Lots of people and especially, new bloggers think about making their sites better over time. But, they forget that the user experience is one of the main things that they should focus on making your blog links open in the same window will forward your traffic to other websites.
So, you will lose previews, visits, and many benefits, such as the duration visit that you need to keep your readers interested.
When you make your WordPress links open in a new window, or tab, instead of the same one, you keep your page open. That way, when the reader finishes with the targeted website, he/she can come back again, and browse your blog, if you have quality content that helps people.
In WordPress, you don’t have to add any HTML code to open page links in new windows, all you have to do is to check a simple box when you need to add new links to your posts. The same thing applies when you add images to your posts. But, beginners can’t figure out how to do that for the first time, and this is why I’m posting this step by step tutorial.
WordPress newbies think that they should install plugins to make their links opens as they want. They add extra plugins that make their blogs load slowly in some cases and even, they don’t need that. WordPress is a powerful blogging and content management system that lets you work, as you want with your content.
Opening WordPress links in new tabs
To open external and internal links in a new window, you need to select the word, or, the phrase that you want to link in your paragraphs. Then, click the “link” icon in your visual text editor, as the following screenshot.
Now, you get a pop-up window on the same page, where you can add your custom link and make it external, or internal, that link to another page or post on the same website.
As you can see, you can link directly to one of your existing blog posts if you have, just click on any post title, and the links will be added automatically with the post name as the link title. Next, you need to check the box “Open link in a new window/tab”, save your link and it’s done.
If you need to add a Nofollow tag to your links, you can read: how to add the nofollow tag to WordPress links. That will help you to avoid linking to untrusted websites that Google can penalize you later, for that. You should use the Nofollow links for all your advertisement and banner links. It’s the Google guidelines that you need to follow.
If you want to understand the exact HTML tag that open links in a new window, then look at the following example:
<a href="http://www.websiteexample.com/" target="_blank">link text</a>
Where the target="_blank in the “href” tag is what will make the link open on its own and a new window.
To make a WordPress image link open in a new window, you need to click on your image, and then, treat it as a word or phrase. Select your image, and click the link icon as the above example, and finally, check the new window box.
If you want an advanced image link adding, you can click your image, then, a small pencil will be added at the top left corner of that image and you can click on that to start editing your image.
Now, you will get the image editing window with useful options that can help with SEO and makes your image readable by search engine crawlers.
To open WordPress menu links in a new window, you need to click “Appearance” in your dashboard, then, “menus”, and you can easily check a simple box. That makes the selected menu open in a new tab or window as the following screenshot example.
If you can’t see that option, then, you’ve disabled it, and you can easily enable the “link target” option in the “advanced menu properties”, by clicking the screen options at the top of your WordPress admin area as next.
Then, enable the option from the page.
That’s all, now, you’ve learned how to make your WordPress internal and external links, and even images and menu links open in a new window. That will help your readers to stay on your website while learning something new, or just checking your recommendations without leaving your site.
