Open external links in a new tab in JavaScript

When you have links on your page but you want to open them in a new tab (when visitors are navigating to another website).

You can use this function:

window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function externalLinks() {
  var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
  for (var i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++) {
    if (anchors[i].hostname !== window.location.hostname) {
      anchors[i].setAttribute("target", "_blank");
      anchors[i].setAttribute("rel", "noopener");
    }
  }
});

We include rel="noopener" to the links so your visitors are less vunrenable to attacks like reverse tabnabbing.

Happy coding! – Found a mistake or a typo? Please submit a PR to my GitHub-repo.