Anchor links

How to make an anchor link

Anchor links have two parts:

• the clickable link at the top of the page
• the section of the page that the link goes to

You might find it easier to start with the second part, creating the anchor at the right page section. Then create the link to the anchor.

Make the anchor

Open the page where you want to create an anchor link, and then

1. Switch to the Text tab (not the Visual tab) of the editor on that page.
2. Locate the heading for the section you want to link to.
3. Within that heading, paste the following code, so it looks as shown below:
   
<h4 id="TYPE A UNIQUE ID HERE">TITLE TEXT HERE</h4>

4. Replace the words TYPE A UNIQUE ID HERE text with text of your own that uniquely identifies that location on the page. It’s best to type something short and easy to remember. For example, for the College of Arts and Letters heading, you could do this:
   
<h4 id="cal">College of Arts and Letters</h4>

5. Update your page in WordPress.

Make the link that goes to the anchor

Stay in the Text tab of the page editor. If you switch to the Visual tab, you will lose some work due to a bug in the editor.

Locate the section at the top of the page when you want your link to appear, and then

1. Type the text that will serve as the link. Make sure it exactly matches the words in the heading that you’re linking to.
   (Note: you can instead copy the heading text and paste it where you want the link.)
2. Select all of the text in the link.
3. Select the link button in the text editor.
4. In the URL field of the window that appears, type a pound sign (#) followed by the ID of the heading you want to link to. For example, if you used cal as the ID for the heading you want to link to, type #cal in the URL field.
5. Click the Add Link button in the window.
6. Update your page in WordPress.

Tips for using anchor links

Make sure the destination of an anchor link is at the beginning of a coherent section of the page. Linking to a heading is usually best, but in some cases, it can make sense to link to something else, such as the start of a table if the table has a caption you can use as your link text.

Make sure the wording of each link in the mini table of contents is the same as the name of the heading that you are linking to.

If your anchors do not seem to work as they should try:

• Make sure your ID is type correctly, it is case sensitive
• Make sure anchors are only within Header tags (h2,h3,h4,h5)
• Links should be the name of the page, www.nau.edu/yoursite/yourpage#ID if you are linking from another page
• If the page doesn’t land exactly where it should test in a Private/Incognito window