How to Add a Link to an External Site to a WordPress Menu

We have written before about adding a menu to a WordPress site so that you can give your visitors an easy way to navigate around the important sections of your website. WordPress makes creating and editing these menus pretty easy compared to some of the older website-building options, so tweaking those menus until they are perfect is something that most WordPress users can handle.

You may be familiar with how to add links to your various pages, categories and posts to that menu, but what if you have another website, or a social media profile, that you want to include in the menu? That’s possible, too, though it might be a little difficult the first time you do it. Our guide below will show you how to add a link to an external site in your WordPress menu.

How to Link to Another Site from Your WordPress Menu

The steps in this article were performed on a WordPress site running the 5.1 version of the application. Note that the settings menu that we are going to be working with in the steps below provides you with a number of options for changing your site’s menu, such as adjusting the anchor text of those links, if needed.

Step 1: Sign into the admin section of your website at (yourdomain.com)/wp-admin.

Step 2: Hover over the Appearance tab at the left side of the window, then choose the Menus option.

Step 3: Click the dropdown menu to the right of Select a menu to edit, choose the menu to which you wish to add the external link, then click the Select button.

Step 4: Select the Custom Links tab, type the URL of the site and the desired link text into the corresponding fields, then click the Add to Menu button.

Step 5: Click on the inserted menu item and drag it to the desired location, then click the Save Menu button.

Now you can go check out the new menu on your site and make sure that everything looks correct and is working as intended.

Matthew Burleigh

Matt has been working with WordPress and creating content using this powerful content management system for years. While he has written about many other tech topics, WordPress is one of his favorites.

You can read his full bio here.