How to link to specific text on a web page

You want to show someone one sentence on a long page. So you send the link and write "scroll down to the third section, the paragraph that starts with pricing". They scroll, miss it, and ask again.

Browsers have a better way built in. It's called a text fragment. It adds a bit to the end of a URL that tells the browser which words to scroll to and highlight, and it works on almost any page without anyone installing anything.

The quick way, by browser

Chrome. Select the text on the page, right-click it, and choose Copy link to highlight. Paste the link anywhere.

Other browsers and phones. Edge, Safari and Firefox all open these links in their recent versions, but where the option to create one lives depends on the browser and version, and on phones it's often buried. The reliable route everywhere is our free link to text generator. Paste the page address and the words, and copy the link.

What the link looks like

The magic is the part after the hash. A link to the words "free forever" on a pricing page looks like this.

https://lasso.team/pricing/#:~:text=free%20forever

There's a small set of rules worth knowing if you ever edit one by hand.

Part	What it does	Example
#:~:text=	Starts the text fragment	always the same
start	The words to find and highlight	free%20forever
start,end	Highlights everything from the first words to the last words	Every%20new,no%20card
prefix-,	Words just before the match, to pick the right one when it appears twice	Studio-,plan
,-suffix	Words just after the match, for the same reason	plan,-costs

Spaces become %20, and a dash, comma or ampersand inside the words has to be written as %2D, %2C or %26, because those characters mean something in the fragment itself. The generator handles all of this for you.

Picking text that won't break

Text links match exact words on the page, so the phrase you choose decides how reliable the link is.

• Choose something distinctive. "Billed yearly" works. "The" highlights the first "the" on the page.
• Keep it short. A sentence or two is plenty. Long selections break when any single word changes.
• For long passages, use start and end. Instead of the whole paragraph, give the first few words and the last few. The generator does this automatically for long selections.
• Prefer stable text. Headings and product names change less than marketing copy.

When text links fail

If the page opens but nothing is highlighted, it's almost always one of these.

1. The words changed. The page was edited, and the exact phrase no longer exists. Pick a new phrase.
2. The text appears more than once. The browser highlights the first match. Add a prefix or suffix, or choose a more unusual phrase.
3. The text is hidden. It sits inside a closed tab, an accordion or a part of the page that loads after a click or a scroll, so the browser can't find it when the page opens.
4. The browser doesn't support it. Older browsers open the page at the top. Nothing breaks, the highlight just doesn't happen.
5. The site rewrote the link. A few sites redirect or strip anything after the hash. There's no fix on your side for that one.

When you need to point at more than text

Text links are brilliant for quotes, but they can't point at a button, a chart, an image or a spacing problem, and they can't carry a note explaining why you're pointing there.

You want to point at	Use
A sentence or quote	A text link
A button, image, chart or form field	A pinned comment
A layout or spacing problem	A pinned comment on a dragged area
Something with a question or request attached	A pinned comment
A specific spot you'll want to find again later	A pinned comment, which keeps a screenshot

So use a text link when you're quoting someone, and a pinned comment when you're starting a conversation about the page.