How can I make menu items open in a new tab in the Dawn theme?

Store Design
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Topic summary

A user requests a built-in option in Shopify’s admin panel to make menu items open in new tabs, particularly for links like “Blog” and social media icons in the Dawn theme.

Current Workarounds:

  • Adding target="_blank" to anchor tags in theme code (e.g., footer.liquid)
  • Using conditional logic to selectively apply this attribute based on link titles
  • Leveraging Shopify’s link.type property to target external links (http_link) automatically

Key Issue:
Shopify’s Navigation settings lack a native “open in new tab” checkbox, forcing users to modify Liquid code. One participant notes that using link.type == 'http_link' also affects product type and vendor collection links unintentionally.

Status:
The discussion remains unresolved as a feature request. Multiple users express frustration that this basic functionality requires custom code rather than being available as a simple admin option.

Summarized with AI on November 2. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
2

Yes, it is possible to have menu items in your Shopify store open in a new tab. Currently, there is no option to select the target to blank when creating menu items in the Shopify admin panel, but you can use a workaround by adding some custom code to your theme.

Find the section of code that defines your menu, which will likely look something like this:

{% for link in linklists.main-menu.links %} {{ link.title }} {% endfor %}

Modify the code to include the “target=_blank” attribute, like this:

{% for link in linklists.main-menu.links %} {{ link.title }} {% endfor %}