Adding a link in Elementor takes about five seconds. Keeping track of those links a year later is the hard part. Elementor stores your page in its own format, and a lot of the tools you’d normally lean on can’t see inside it. So this guide covers both: how to add internal links in Elementor by hand, and how to stop them going quietly stale.<\/p>\n
There are two places links live in Elementor. One is inside running text. The other is a widget’s own Link field.<\/p>\n
Button, Heading, Image and Icon Box widgets have a Link<\/strong> field in their Content tab. Paste the address there. The small gear next to the field opens options like opening in a new tab and adding One thing worth knowing: a linked heading or a button is fine, but the label is usually short and generic (“Learn more”, “Shop now”). Links in sentences tend to carry better anchor text, so don’t rely only on buttons.<\/p>\n Here’s the part most guides skip. A normal WordPress post keeps its text in one database field, Elementor does write a plain copy of the page into That causes three real problems:<\/p>\n Google sees the rendered HTML, so this isn’t an SEO penalty. It’s your own tools that get confused.<\/p>\n Mostly, yes. Elementor’s Tabs, Accordion and Toggle widgets put all their content in the page HTML and hide the closed panels with CSS. Search engines can crawl those links like any other. Google has said for years that content hidden behind tabs on mobile-friendly pages gets full weight.<\/p>\n The thing to check is whether the content is really in the HTML. Right-click the page, choose View page source<\/strong>, and search for the link. If it’s there, you’re fine. If a panel only loads its content with JavaScript after a click (some third-party addons do this), crawlers may never see it.<\/p>\n Practically, though: put your most important links in text people will actually read. A link buried in the fifth accordion item of an FAQ is crawlable, but almost nobody clicks it.<\/p>\n The anchor is the clickable words. It tells readers and search engines what’s on the other side. A few rules that hold up:<\/p>\n We go into more detail in our post on anchor text best practices in WordPress<\/a>.<\/p>\n There’s no magic number. A 600-word landing page might need three good links. A long guide could reasonably carry fifteen. Aim for links a reader would actually want at that point in the page, and stop there.<\/p>\n Watch out for Elementor’s global parts, though. Your header, footer and any site-wide sections add the same links to every page. They count, but they don’t help a reader find related content. The links inside the page body do that job.<\/p>\n A page nothing links to is called an orphan. Visitors can’t reach it by clicking around, and search engines treat it as unimportant. Elementor itself has no report for this.<\/p>\n The reliable manual method is a crawl. Run a crawler such as Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) over your site, export the list of pages it found, and compare it against your XML sitemap. Anything in the sitemap that the crawl never reached is an orphan. Because a crawler reads the rendered HTML, Elementor’s storage format doesn’t trip it up.<\/p>\n If you’d rather use a plugin, check that it reads Elementor’s data and not just Say you rename a page’s slug from For step 2, Elementor has Elementor > Tools > Replace URL<\/strong>. It changes addresses inside Elementor’s data, but it’s built for moving a whole site to a new domain and wants full URLs. Back up the database before using it. For a handful of pages, opening each one and fixing the link by hand is honestly fine.<\/p>\n We wrote up the full process in changing a WordPress permalink without losing traffic<\/a>.<\/p>\nnofollow<\/code>. For internal links, leave both off. Sending your own readers to a new tab is mildly annoying, and nofollow on your own pages just throws away a signal you control.<\/p>\nWhy do Elementor links get lost?<\/h2>\n
post_content<\/code>. An Elementor page doesn’t. Elementor saves the whole layout as JSON in a separate field, _elementor_data<\/code>, and builds the page from that when someone visits.<\/p>\npost_content<\/code> when you save in its editor. But that copy can be empty or out of date, for example after importing a template kit or moving pages between sites. Anything that only reads post_content<\/code> then sees a different page from the one visitors get.<\/p>\n\n
post_content<\/code> can call a page an orphan when it’s actually well linked, or the other way round.<\/li>\n\/old-page\/<\/code> is saved as \\\/old-page\\\/<\/code>. Search for the plain version and some tools find nothing.<\/li>\npost_content<\/code> but not the JSON, the next save in Elementor writes the old link straight back.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nDo links in tabs and accordions count?<\/h2>\n
What anchor text should you use?<\/h2>\n
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How many internal links should an Elementor page have?<\/h2>\n
How do you find Elementor pages with no internal links?<\/h2>\n
post_content<\/code>. Otherwise you’ll get the wrong list. Our walkthrough on finding orphaned pages in WordPress<\/a> covers the rest of the process.<\/p>\nWhat happens to your links when a URL changes?<\/h2>\n
\/coffee-grinders\/<\/code> to \/best-coffee-grinders\/<\/code>. Every Elementor page that linked to the old address still does. Here’s the order we’d do it in:<\/p>\n\n
Using JnK Linkweave with Elementor<\/h2>\n