How to embed links in WordPress comments*

* … and in any other HTML (hypertext markup language), for that matter.

I’ve been blogging now for *cough* years, and in all that time I’ve very rarely seen comments that have links in them. I think that there may be two reasons for this: 1) a reluctance to link to other content (maybe?) and 2) a lack of knowledge of how to do it.

If you can memorise just fifteen characters, you’ll be able to embed links in comments.

Those fifteen characters are:

<a href=""></a>

OK, I admit it’s not quite as simple as that; there are a couple more things you need to know. But just two (I promise!).

Step one:

Remember two places within those fifteen characters:

<a href=" first place "> second place </a>

Step two: (there are a few bits to this, but they’re all really easy — I promise!)

In the ‘second place’ you put the text you want the link to appear on.

<a href=" first place ">my link text goes here</a>

Now you need to navigate to the page you want to link to and copy the address (the “http://” bit) of that page from the browser’s address bar. For this blog’s home page, this would be “http://pendantry.wordpress.com”.

Then, in the ‘first place’, you paste the address you just copied:

<a href=" https://pendantry.wordpress.com ">my link text goes here</a>

What you end up with after the comment has been processed by the blog, is something that looks (and acts) like this:

my link text goes here

The trick is to type in those fifteen characters (the ones you memorised earlier) first, and then move the cursor to the ‘first place’ and the ‘second place’ and enter the text in there afterwards. If you do that, you have less chance of getting it wrong.

Note that this may not work in all blogs; some are configured to strip out any HTML in comments. Also, comments with links in them may, depending on the blog’s policy, be held in a moderation queue before being released.

Go ahead and try it out yourself in the comments section below, I won’t mind ;)

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Techie notes to self:
(1) ‘/’ is ampersand-hash-47-semicolon. I needed to replace the four slashes (in the paragraph that begins ‘Now you need to navigate…’) right before hitting ‘publish’, or WordPress would have converted them back to their native forms and there would have been a couple of links in the post where we didn’t want them.
(2) I amended this post on 01Sep2021… all I wanted to do was to add in a ‘Tech tips’ category to the post, but because it was all originally a ‘classic block’, and ‘Gutenberg’ has changed things so much, it took me a while to ensure I didn’t mess it all up. This has been one of the trickiest posts I’ve ever put together!
(Hope you found it interesting.)