Have you ever seen sites that show a live preview of links when you bring your mouse over them? That’s by using a jQuery popup which displays a screenshot of a linked page when users bring their mouse over the link. In this article we will show you how to show live preview of links in WordPress.
Video Tutorial
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First thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Live Preview Links plugin. Upon activation, a new menu item labeled Live Preview Links will appear in your WordPress admin bar. Clicking on it will take you to the plugin’s settings page.
Using this plugin, you can have live previews for external, internal, all, or selective links. Depending on what you are trying to achieve, many sites use live previews for external sites. Some eCommerce sites use live previews to show a peek into product pages. Keep in mind that too many live previews can be very distracting and annoying for your users.
Choosing class="wp-live-preview" will allow you to manually display live previews for links as you add them. Simply add the class to your links like this:
<a href="http://www.example.com" class="wp-live-preview">Example Link</a>
Among other settings, you can choose the size of live preview popup window, position, and the site viewport of the link previewed. The default settings would work for most sites. Simply click on the save changes button to store your settings.
You can now visit your website to see the live preview for links in action.
We hope this article helped you learn how to show live preview of links in WordPress. You may also want to take a look at our guide on how to fix broken links in WordPress with broken link checker.
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Colin says
Thanks for the article, that plugin has ceased operation and is no longer downloadable, if you had a new suggestion that works I’d greatly appreciate it. The RT Media paid version isn’t up to scratch and there’s not a lot to be found via Google.
WPBeginner Support says
Thank you for letting us know, we will be sure to look into updating this article
Admin
Marcus Quiroga says
Hi,
Is there an update of this function nowadays? I’m trying it on external links at. Does someone could help me with that?
thank you
WPBeginner Staff says
Thanks for correcting us, we have updated the article.
Tim Roberts says
How do you get this to on work on specifc links.
WPBeginner Staff says
Unfortunately plugin does not have a way to show preview for selective links you can only choose from all, internal, or external links.
Bruce Brown says
Select the “class” option, then put the class on the links you want to display.
Per Søderlind says
Hi, I’m the plugin author.
You can get this to work on specific links by adding class=”wp-live-preview” to the link, and in the settings page set ‘Live Preview Links’ to ‘class=”wp-live-preview’. See the demo links on my site.