Links

The Link component allows you to easily customize anchor elements with your theme colors and typography styles.

Simple links

The Link component is built on top of the Typography component. You can leverage its properties.

However, the Link component has different default properties than the Typography component:

• color="primary" as the link needs to stand out.
• variant="inherit" as the link will, most of the time, be used as a child of a Typography component.

Accessibility

• When providing the content for the link, avoid generic descriptions like "click here" or "go to". Instead, use specific descriptions.
• For the best user experience, links should stand out from the text on the page.
• If a link doesn't have a meaningful href, it should be rendered using a <button> element.

Security

When you use target="_blank" with Links, it is recommended to always set rel="noopener" or rel="noreferrer" when linking to third party content.

• rel="noopener" prevents the new page from being able to access the window.opener property and ensures it runs in a separate process. Without this, the target page can potentially redirect your page to a malicious URL.
• rel="noreferrer" has the same effect, but also prevents the Referer header from being sent to the new page. ⚠️ Removing the referrer header will affect analytics.

Third-party routing library

One common use case is to perform the navigation on the client only, without doing a .html round-trip with the server. The Link component provides a property to handle this use case: component.

/* eslint-disable jsx-a11y/anchor-is-valid */
import React from 'react';
import { MemoryRouter as Router } from 'react-router';
import { Link as RouterLink } from 'react-router-dom';
import Link from '@material-ui/core/Link';

// The usage of React.forwardRef will no longer be required for react-router-dom v6.
// see https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/issues/6056
const AdapterLink = React.forwardRef((props, ref) => <RouterLink innerRef={ref} {...props} />);

const CollisionLink = React.forwardRef((props, ref) => (
  <RouterLink innerRef={ref} to="/getting-started/installation/" {...props} />
));

export default function LinkRouter() {
  return (
    <Router>
      <div>
        <Link component={RouterLink} to="/">
          Simple case
        </Link>
        <br />
        <Link component={AdapterLink} to="/">
          Ref forwarding
        </Link>
        <br />
        <Link component={CollisionLink}>Avoids props collision</Link>
      </div>
    </Router>
  );
}

Note: Creating the Link components is necessary to prevent unexpected unmounting. You can read more about it in our component property guide.

API

• <Link />