By default, Hugo does not render HTML (and JavaScript). So you can’t use HTML tags in the markdown files. To enable this, change the following setting in config.yml:

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markup:
    goldmark:
        renderer:
            unsafe: true

If your theme uses TOML or JSON, you can get instructions for these here.

If HTML rendering is enabled in Hugo as mentioned above, then you can just use <a href="example.com" target="_blank"> in the markdown files and it will work. But if you like to have a more consistent Hugo syntax in your hugo-markdown files, then you can create and use a shortcode. This just converts the shortcode in your md file into HTML to be rendered on the page.

  • Create a shortcode file opennewtab.html in layouts/shortcodes/
  • Add this line to the file <a href="{{ .Get "href" }}" rel="noopener" target="_blank">{{ .Get "title" }}</a>
  • You can now use the shortcode in your hugo-markdown file. (remove the spaces between {{ < and > }})
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{{ < opennewtab href="http://example.com" title="Example" > }}

Reference site for more details.