How to use the href tag in React

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to use the href tag in react to open the link in a new tab or page.

Normally, we create a link in React using the <Link> component.

<Link to="/about">About</Link>

If we click on the above link, it will open an About page in the same tab.

Opening the link in a new tab using href

To open the link in a new tab, we can use the <a> element with a target = _blank attribute. So, whenever a user clicks on a link it opens it in a new tab.

Here is an example:

<a href="https://twitter.com/" target="_blank">Twitter</a>

In the example above, if a user clicks on the Twitter link it will open the twitter url in a new tab.

Note: If you are using target=_blank, your page performance may suffer to avoid that you can use rel="noreferrer noopener".

<a href="https://twitter.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">
   Twitter
</a>

You can also dynamically pass a link to the href tag in react like this:

<a href={link} target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">
   Twitter
</a>

In programmatic navigation, we can use the window.open() method in react to open the link in a new tab.

Example:

import React from "react";

function App() {
  const handleClick = () => {
    window.open("http://twitter.com/");
  };

  return (
    <div>
      <h2>App</h2>
      <button onClick={handleClick}>Twitter</button>
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

Here is how you can open the internal links in a new tab using the <Link> component in React:

<Link to="/about" target="_blank">About</Link>