What Are Anchor Links?
Anchor links, also called jump links or in-page links, are links that lead to another part of the page. If someone clicks on an anchor link, he doesn’t go to a new page but to another part of the same page.
Why We Need Anchor Links?
In our longer WordPress posts, we use anchor links to help users jump to the section they want to read. These links are commonly used in table of contents sections to allow users to navigate up and down a longer article without reloading the page.
Let’s start with a live example of anchor links.
Below is a list of all the topics we will cover in this guide. Go ahead and click on any of these links, and you’ll be taken to that specific section.
When do we use anchor links?
The average user spends less than a few seconds on your website before deciding whether or not to stay. You have few seconds to convince users to stay.
The best way to do this is to make it easy to reach the information they seek.
Anchor links make this easier by letting people to jump straight to the section of a content that interest them. This improves overall user experience and helps in the introduction of additional readers.
Anchor links are helpful to WordPress SEO too though. As a “jump to link,” Google can display an anchor link in the search results.
Google may also display several links from that page as jump to links, that has been shown to increase search result click-through rates. In other words, you increase the number of visitors to your website.
How to manually add anchor links in classic editor
Here’s how to create an anchor link / jump link to WordPress if you’re still using the old classic editor.
Step 1 : Create the anchor link
To create an anchor link, first select the text you wish to change and then click the ‘Insert Link’ button.
Then, you need to add your anchor link with a # sign prefix followed by the slug you want to use for the link.
Step 2 : Add the ID attribute to the linked section
The next step is to point the browsers to the section you want to show when users click on your anchor link.
For that, you’ll need to switch to the ‘Text’ mode in the classic editor. After that scroll down to the section that you want to show.
Now go to the HTML tag you want to target. For example, <h2>, <h3>, <p>, and so on.
You need to add the ID attribute to it with your anchor link’s slug without the # prefix, like this:
<h2 id="best-coffee-shops-manhattan">
Now save your changes and click on the preview button to see your anchor link in action.
How to add anchor links in content builder option?
Go to Content Builder Option in your WordPress admin panel, and select the element/block you need to put anchor link to,
Now you need to add the id attribute to your slug option without the # prefix like this,
The next step is to link this section to the required section/part you need user to jump from with # attached to the slug.
like this :
Conclusion
If you want to increase the number of visitors to your website and make the content more accessible to the masses, you should include jump links in your blog posts.