Can I Open a Wordpress Menu Link in a New Tab?

Is it a good idea to open menu links in new tabs?

The answer to that... isn't in this post. What I am going to talk about in this post is how to get it done. After all, it seems like a simple thing and should be easy and yet when you look at the options given in Wordpress's menu builder, it's generally nowhere to be found.

Zooming in a little closer, you can see that the options presented for the individual link are pretty limited. But don't worry, we can fix that.

If you look towards the upper right of the admin screen of the menu builder, you'll see a small tab labelled "Screen Options." Click that.

That will expand downward and present you with some options for this screen. As you'll see some of these are already checked, but some aren't. That's where we'll find what we're looking for.

Under the "Show advanced menu properties" is a check box labelled "Link Target". Checking this option will give us the option to open menu items in a new tab.

The image below shows where this new menu item option is located. While the screen option is labelled "Link Target" the check box it enables for the menu items it labelled a bit more intuitively as "Open link in a new tab."

By checking that box for that link, it will now open in a new tab when clicked. This option isn't just enabled for external links, but also for internal links such as pages and posts. So if you have a link to one of your posts in a menu and want it to open in a new tab, that option will be there for that menu item. Whether or not it's a good idea to open internal or external links in a new tab is a topic for another post. Just know that for now, you have the power.