This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Easy External Links

Description

Easy External Links is a SEO friendly, external link handler for WordPress.

The current aim of Easy External Links is to standardize the format of external links and create consistent on-page SEO.

Demo | Options

Features

  • Open external links in a new tab or current tab
  • Domain Filtering
  • Show icon next to external link (100 icons to chose from)
  • External image hosting support
  • Add rel=”external nofollow” to external links
  • Add title attribute to external links (uses to the text of the link)
  • Add target=”_blank” to comment links (rel=”external nofollow” coming soon)
  • Add target=”_blank” to external links in excerpts

Screenshots

  • Options Page

Installation

  1. Upload the folder wp-links to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  3. Visit the Easy External Links Options page under settings and adjust advanced settings.

Reviews

September 11, 2016
Very easy to setup and works like a charm. I’d like to be able to set icon for internal links too. This plugin let you to setup only external links.
September 3, 2016
Easy External Links does exactly what I need, shows a small icon next to external links, making it clear to the visitor that the link opens up an external website in a new tab. This could be done manually, but Easy External Links just makes it a lot easier ๐Ÿ˜‰ Hoping for a WordPress 4.5 tested update in the near feature.
Read all 17 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Easy External Links” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “Easy External Links” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

= 2.2
Preserve class attribute on internal and whitelist URLs
Fixes strpos issue

= 2.0
Removed PHP short tags from all PHP scripts
Added nonce to POST calls to prevent unauthorized access
sanitize_text_field() added to the title shortcode on output
sanitize_text_field() callback added to all register_setting() calls
Added URL whitelist functionality

1.9.6.2

Fixed issue with internal tags

1.9.3

Added custom structure to link title, found in options under ‘Link Options’ when ‘Add title attribute to external links’ is selected.
Bug fixes

1.9.2

Bug fixes

1.9.1

Added support for external image hosting. Assists in domain mapping and multi support

1.9

img fix and performance improvements

1.8

Bug fixes – moved add_filter priority to 9

1.7

Control how external links open and minor code tweaks.

1.6

Added the ability to display an icon next to external links.

1.5

WordPress core updates.

1.4

Fix blank space error.

1.0

First release of the plugin.