reclaimedpress

Thanks for getting back to me! Understood. I was able to find a solution. While I lose the bells and whistles of your plugin, it does the trick for me.

If anyone else is running into this issue, I used the Snippets plugin to add the following to the header of all my front-end pages:

<script>

/** 
 * Open all external links in a new window
 */
jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
	$('a')
		.filter('[href^="http"], [href^="//"]')
		.not('[href*="' + window.location.host + '"]')
		.attr('rel', 'noopener noreferrer')
		.attr('target', '_blank');
});
	
jQuery(function($)
{
  $(document).ajaxStop(function()
  {
	$('a')
		.filter('[href^="http"], [href^="//"]')
		.not('[href*="' + window.location.host + '"]')
		.attr('rel', 'noopener noreferrer')
		.attr('target', '_blank');  });
});
</script>