The best WordPress affiliate plugins

If you’re thinking about launching an affiliate marketing program on WordPress, you’ll want to use the most effective plugins on the market to take your program to the next level and boost your sales.

What are affiliate plugins used for?

A plugin is a software add-on that’s installed on a program to enhance its capabilities. An affiliate marketing plugin provides you with the unique tools you need to build a strong affiliate campaign and aid growth.

While some WordPress plugins will cater for both, some are better for vendors and some are more suitable for marketing, making it important to know which features are essential for your business’ needs before choosing which plugin to use. Some will aim to be an all-in-one solution, while others may focus on a specific aspect - site construction, finding affiliates or referrals.

If you use a content management system like WordPress, an affiliate plugin can be easily integrated. Equally, if you run an online store with an affiliate marketing program and use WooCommerce built into WordPress, a WooCommerce affiliate plugin will allow you to manage your partnerships and campaigns.

Common features of affiliate plugins aimed at publishers

At the most basic level, as a publisher, an affiliate marketing plugin will help you:

• Add affiliate links to your posts and get more clicks
• Manage affiliate links in your WordPress dashboard
• Track the performance of your campaigns
• Build shareable referral links

What vendors should look for in an affiliate plugin

While affiliate plugins will have their own specialisms and key features, the top options should all include the following:

• Ease of use
• Broad personalisations and customisation options
• Automation features
• Integration with popular e-commerce plugins

7 of the best affiliate plugin for WordPress

With so many WordPress plugins available, picking the right one for your business can be confusing. Do your research, considering your goals, strategy and price range. Look at the features included. Is there a particular function you need? Are you after a solution that provides in-depth support for beginners? Getting it right will make a monumental difference in the long run.

To help you make an informed choice, we’ve narrowed it down and picked some of our favourites. Note that costs and figures are correct at time of publishing.

1. Pretty Links

An excellent affiliate link management plugin for WordPress is Pretty Links.Trusted by over 200,000 websites, the platform makes managing your social links, URL redirects, affiliate links and QR codes much easier for beginners – just upload and activate the plugin and create links using your website instantly. 

While Pretty Links doesn’t automatically check your website for broken links, it will allow you to access detailed link reports in your WordPress admin dashboard, which allows you to see which links are performing best, plus a range of highly functional features, including automatically linking keywords to a specific URL.

Key features:

• Automatic keyword linking
• Google Analytics integration
• Monsterinsights integration
• Mange server redirects and 404s
• Link shortening and cloaking

Negatives:

• Doesn’t automatically check your website for broken links

2. Thirsty Affiliates

Although Thirsty Affiliates was built with WordPress bloggers in mind, it’s a great option for any affiliate marketers using WordPress to manage affiliate links. The plugin has been downloaded over 400,000 times by WordPress sites worldwide.

Benefits of ThirstyAffiliates include seamless management of your affiliate links in one central location (the WordPress dashboard); ‘link cloaking’, which disguises an affiliate link URL to make it shorter; and an automatic 404 checker to ensure you have no broken links or errors. However, integration is limited. Major services like Google Analytics and Amazon are compatible, but some other popular plugins are not e.g; WooCommerce.

Key features:

• Link cloaking and shortening
• Keyword auto-linking
• Geo-targeting
• Click tracking
• Automatic link health checks

Negatives:

• Not compatible with WooCommerce

3. AdSanity

AdSanity is an ad management plugin that has proved to be incredibly useful for publishers. This plugin can be used to help you create and manage affiliate ads on your WordPress site with ease.

While there is no free version, AdSanity is considered to be good value due to its ease of use and range of features - creating shortcodes, template tags and widgets and gaining insight with easy Google Analytics integration - with even more features available in AdSanity’s extensive suite of add-ons. AdSanity also supports HTML5 ads and ad block detection, all from one user-friendly, lightweight platform that sits right in your WordPress dashboard.

Key features:

• Self-hosted affiliate ad banners
• Beginner-friendly design
• Ad block detection

Negatives:

• No free version

4. ReferralCandy for WooCommerce

If you’re an advertiser looking for a 5-star rated e-commerce plugin, try ReferralCandy. Free to download, but with a range of paid plans to explore, it allows you to automate customer referral campaigns for your WooCommerce store. Customer referral programs encourage existing customers to refer new customers by incentivising the process. That means that, should a customer refer the product to someone else and they make a purchase, the referrer will be rewarded with a discount, gift, or otherwise.

This differs from affiliate programs – affiliate partners don’t necessarily have to be customers – but many publishers explore both avenues. ReferralCandy is designed to make creating referral programs easy and efficient. There’s live chat support, unlimited affiliates and an easy-to-use dashboard and data reporting features.

Key features:

• Free to download
• Unlimited affiliates
• 24/7 support via live chat
• Focus on referral programs

Negatives:

• Limited to referral programs, which can have a narrower market than other approaches.

5. MonsterInsights

Google Analytics is a must-have piece of kit for affiliate marketers as it enables you to track your traffic, conversions and clicks. Offering a seamless integration, MonsterInsights is a powerful Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that presents a host of popular features, including universal tracking, real-time stats, e-commerce reports, custom dimensions and the Google Analytics Dashboard. Configuring features like event tracking may still be quite technical, but for most general users, the plugin’s main features are very user-friendly.

Key features:

• Detailed affiliate campaign reporting
• Makes Google Analytics accessible to new users (GA4)
• GA4 integration
• Compatibility with many popular affiliate plugins

Negatives:

• Some features can be complicated to set up for less technical users.

6. Affiliate Booster Blocks

Looking for a block editor plugin? Affiliate Booster Blocks’ ability to add custom blocks for affiliate marketers could be ideal. 

Ideal for non-technical users, Affiliate Booster Blocks requires no coding experience as users can visually design their site using 11 pre-designed blocks - including Pros and Cons, notifications and call to action - to make constructing a fully-featured affiliate site quick and simple. 

Using a tool that is this simple could risk your site looking generic, but high levels of customisation options, both structural and visual, mean that you can create a powerful site without losing your creativity to stock templates.

Key features:

• Simple to use for beginners
• Broad customisation options
• Add a wide range of blocks to your site without coding
• Reduce page build times

Negatives:

• Visual customisation is required to avoid sites looking generic.

7. WooCommerce Tracker plugin

ShareASale’s Woocommerce Tracker plugin is an open-source shopping cart plug-in for tracking WooCommerces sales. By setting a tracking pixel on a merchant’s shopping cart, the WooCommerce Tracker plugin can make automatic adjustments to account for refunds and coupons.

One of the biggest benefits of ShareASale’s Woocommerce Tracker plugin is its convenience, helping users to identify suitable products for their affiliate programs, which are all sorted by category and updated daily. A small quirk that users should pay close attention to is that affiliate links can sometimes include special characters that cause coding problems in WordPress, but aside from this, users find the plugin easy to set up and benefit from the advanced analytics it offers.

Key features:

• Advanced analytics
• Auto-edits for refunds
• Product datafeed generation
• Easy setup

Negatives:

• Affiliate links can sometimes include special characters that may cause WordPress issues.

WordPress affiliate plugin comparison

As a recap, here are the eight plugins we have looked at, covering their cost and key features:

Awin’s WooCommerce for WordPress advertiser plugin

As a global affiliate network, Awin comes equipped with the tools needed to help advertisers and publishers connect and create long-lasting, profitable partnerships.

Awin’s Advertiser tracking tool for WooCommerce adds our optimised MasterTag tracking code to your advertiser website, which feeds directly into Awin’s reporting suite. Tracking is fundamental when running affiliate programs and this plugin minimises the tech setup required – helping you get up and running as quickly as possible. The Advertiser Tracking tool is regularly updated, ensuring you never miss a sale and that your affiliate tracking is always compliant.

The Awin Publisher MasterTag plugin allows publishers to harness the latest conversion boosting tracking technology. After installing MasterTag via the WordPress plugin, publishers will be able to activate Awin’s Bounceless Tracking, adMission, and Convert-A-Link features.

• Bounceless Tracking optimises tracking for any given click and determines the most effective method for that particular scenario
• adMission provides easily customisable affiliate disclosure for both pages and links
• Convert-A-Link automatically turns any Awin advertiser link into a tracking link and informs the advertiser that you have sent traffic their way

Find out more about Awin’s affiliate advertiser tools

MyAwin, Awin’s Google Chrome browser extension, allows publishers to easily join an advertiser’s affiliate program, quickly generate short, tracked links and custom URLs, creates one-click shares for social media and can generate links to specific product pages without leaving the advertiser’s site.

Similarly, Awin's Shopify app gives users everything they need to integrate their stores with the network and manage their affiliate activity. Once the simple activation process is complete, users will be able to directly communicate with affiliate partners and track voucher, product, sale, click, and impressions with publishers active on the Awin network.

Awin also provides a wealth of helpful features like tracking cross device transactions, highlighting touchpoints in sales where publishers didn’t receive the last click, and the opportunity marketplace to ensure publishers are able to optimise their campaigns and see maximise their commission earning potential.

If you’re a publisher or content creator who’s new to affiliate marketing, a huge amount of support is available to help you optimise your campaigns and grow. More information can be found on our publisher success center or by getting in touch with our local teams.