Making a link is possibly one of the most important things you can do when publishing on the web. Seriously. The web, after all, is a web. You can link internally to your own site or you can link to another site, but the mechanics are about the same.

By way of some unnecessary but interesting background, the links you make are fundamentally HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), even if you don’t write them directly in HTML. But in order for someone’s browser to render a link properly, it has to be read as HTML. I’ve included notes below for both the HTML and visual editors.

In HTML editor mode

In html, a basic link looks like this: <a href="x" title="y">z</a> where x is the url you want to link to, y is a title or name that you assign to the link that you’re making, and z is the text (or object) that you want the link to apply to.

For example, to make the word “Sherwin” a link to Sherwin’s website, we do this:

<a href="http://www.sherwinarnott.org/" title="Sherwin's personal blog">Sherwin</a> which renders this: Sherwin

This is a basic link, mind you, and you can add other features, like telling the link to open in a new window, but we recommend against this. Let people decide for themselves whether they want to open a link in a new window.

In VISUAL editor mode

You have a WordPress website so that you don’t have to write your links in HTML. So simply select the text you want to become a link and click the LINK icon.

You will get a pop up that looks like the image below. You can see that I’ve already filled out the link URL and link title.

To fill out the link url it’s often easiest to copy and paste a url directly from your browser. Don’t forget to click INSERT.

If you ever want to break a link, just put your cursor on the text that is currently linked and click the UNLINK icon.