A tip I give when building a website is to make sure all external links open in a New Tab, as opposed to people just leaving your website to go check something out that you suggested they click on. A great example of this would be links to your social media accounts. We will use Facebook as an example. They currently have 2 BILLION monthly active users. I’m guessing you have fewer people coming to your website monthly. So they don’t need any help from you. But you do want people to check out your Facebook page so you link to it from your site. Then they go to check it out and you have them leave your site to go there. Then they get a notification from Facebook that the latest Cat Video is live and now they are down that rabbit hole. They completely forget about your site. If you had Facebook open in a new tab, they could go watch their cat videos, then when they are done they would see your site in their tabs and remember that they needed to buy 10,000 shirts from you. So here is how you do it.
So if you are manually adding links to your web page, you link would traditionally look like this from a coding perspective – <a href=”http://aaronmontgomery.info/events/make-money-digital-decorating/>Digital Decorating Class</a>. To get that same link to open in a new window or tab (depending on which web browser they are using and how they configured that browser), all you have to do is add a target=”_blank” attribute to your links (anchor tags). So now that same link will look like this in the code – <a href=”http://aaronmontgomery.info/events/make-money-digital-decorating/” target=”_blank”>Digital Decorating Class</a>.
Now many of you are not manually coding your links, you are just using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. So you are most likely clicking a button that looks like
So from here, you have a few options.
- You can go to the Text or Source edit portion of your WYSIWYG editor and manually add the target=”_blank” attribute as if you were manually coding the links.
- Most WYSIWYG editors have some options when you are adding the links or ways to go back and edit those links after adding them. In those options should be a button or box you can check to have the link open in a new tab or window. (P.S. If you have a choice, choose tab, not a new window.)
WordPress WYSIWYG
So as you can see, this is very simple, yet will go a long way into helping people come back to your website, to buy your products or services or take the action you would like them to take, even if you want to show them something externally every now and again.
If you are having trouble with this, just Contact Me and we can set up a time to do a quick screen share so I can help point you in the right direction for your particular website builder.