Next.js provides a nifty little Link component, which allows internal linking within your React application without causing a page refresh.

<Link href="/">Home</Link>

While this works great, there are situations where you want to pass additional attributes to your anchor tag, such as aria attributes or custom data attributes.

Since Link is a React component and expects specific props to be passed, you can’t simply pass in the attributes as props to the Link component.

// This doesn't work, the rendered anchor tag ignores
// the additional attribute
<Link href="/" data-name="custom">Home</Link>

Lucky for us, Next provides a simple solution to this:

<Link href="/">
  <a data-name="custom">Home</a>
</Link>

Note: It's important that your href stay as a prop in Link rather than an attribute in the anchor tag.

This renders out to <a href="/" data-name="custom">Home</a> in the DOM and maintains the internal linking speediness we love about Next!