WordPress makes it simple to add, edit, and remove links to your own pages or even external web pages. There are two kinds of links: Internal and External. Internal Links will go to your same domain which could be a page, post, or document such as a PDF. An External Link will lead away from your website and to separate domain. For example, if my domain is “www.iqcomputing.com” an Internal Link would be www.iqcomputing.com/hosting/. Staying with the same example, an External Link would be http://www.google.com, see the difference?
Adding a Link in WordPress
No matter if you’re editing a Post or Page the method will be exactly the same. First you will need to log into WordPress and navigate to the page you would like to edit. Once on the edit screen you can highlight any text within the editor using your mouse cursor and then click the “paperclip” or “link” icon just above the content area. This will open a pop-up box prompting you for more information. You’ll see a few options:
- URL – Here you can set the page URL directly, copy and paste or type it in.
- Title – This text will show up if you hover over the link.
- Open Link in a new Window/Tab – When dealing with External Links you will always want to open the link in a new tab so you will want to check this box. If you are adding an Internal Link you will want to leave this unchecked.
- There is a hidden option just above “Cancel” which says, “Or link to existing content” which when clicked will display a box where you can search for pages you have created in WordPress. When you click one of these pages, WordPress will automatically fill in the URL and Title for the link. This is the simplest option when linking Internally.
Links To Emails are a little different. To keep your email safe from Spam Bots we disallow you enter your email in plain text but we do allow linking to email addresses. All you would need to do is when adding the link, before the email address you would prepend mailto: so that an email URL would look something like mailto:handle@domain.com which will open up in the users default mail application.
Editing and Removing Links
Now you have the link created, but you want to change where the URL points to, or where the link goes when a user clicks it. First you can click the underlined text in the editor or highlight the linked text. Then you click the same paperclip icon in the toolbar which will pop up a link settings window. Here you can edit anything and everything about the link. “What about removing the link entirely?” you ask inquisitively. Well, eager user, you would simply highlight the link and click the “broken paperclip” icon which is directly right of the link / paperclip icon. This will remove all traces of links in the highlighted text.
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