WordPress runs a huge share of affiliate sites, and "how do I manage my affiliate links?" is one of the first real questions every WordPress affiliate hits. The usual answer — "install a cloaking plugin" — is correct but incomplete. A plugin will tidy and count your links beautifully, and then stop exactly one step before the thing you actually want to know: which links make money. This guide covers the full picture — setup, cloaking, tracking — and where the plugins run out.
The three jobs of affiliate link management
Managing affiliate links in WordPress is really three separate jobs, and it helps to keep them straight because different tools cover different ones.
Cloak and organise — turn long, ugly affiliate URLs into tidy branded redirects (yoursite.com/go/product) you can insert with a shortcode or block and update in one place. Count clicks — log how often each link is clicked. Attribute revenue — connect those clicks to what they actually earned. Cloaking plugins own the first two. The third is where most WordPress setups quietly fall short.
Cloaking: what it is and why it helps
Link cloaking replaces a sprawling affiliate URL with a short link on your own domain that redirects to the real one. It's the backbone of tidy WordPress link management, and it earns its keep for practical reasons:
- Insert once, reuse everywhere. Reference
yoursite.com/go/blenderin any post instead of pasting a giant URL each time. - Update in one place. If a link changes — a new program, a dead product — you edit the redirect once and every post updates.
- Cleaner content. Short branded links read better and survive copy-paste intact.
One firm caveat: cloaking is not hiding. You must still disclose your affiliate relationship clearly, and mark affiliate links as sponsored (see the nofollow/sponsored entry). Cloaking is about management and tidiness, never concealment — dressing a link up to disguise that it's an affiliate link is exactly what erodes trust and invites trouble.
The plugin landscape
A few categories of tool cover WordPress affiliate links, and it's worth knowing what each is for:
- Dedicated link cloakers (such as ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links) — the specialists: cloak, organise into categories, auto-link keywords, and count clicks. The default choice for link management.
- All-in-one affiliate content tools (such as Lasso) — cloaking and click tracking plus display features like comparison boxes and product displays.
- Amazon-specific display tools (such as AAWP) — pull live Amazon data into boxes and tables; more about presentation than link management.
Any of these handles cloaking and click counts well. None of them, by design, knows your commissions — so all of them stop at the same place.
Where the plugins stop: clicks aren't earnings
Here's the gap, stated plainly. A cloaking plugin can tell you /go/blender was clicked 400 times this month. It cannot tell you that those clicks earned $84, or that /go/mixer earned more from half the clicks. Counting clicks is not knowing what earns — and for an affiliate, what earns is the whole point.
This isn't a flaw in the plugins; it's outside their job. They live at the clicks layer of the affiliate analytics stack. Revenue lives one layer up, and reaching it means joining your click data to your actual network earnings — the same revenue attribution problem every affiliate faces, WordPress or not.
Closing the gap in WordPress
The good news is that WordPress makes the final step easy, because adding a tracking script is trivial. To get from clicks to revenue:
- Keep your cloaking plugin for management — it's good at that, and nothing here replaces it.
- Add analytics that tracks outbound clicks by page, not just totals per link.
- Bring in your network earnings and reconcile them against those clicks, so revenue attaches to pages and links.
Because a WordPress site can drop in a script tag in seconds, a cookieless analytics tool like Clickolytics slots in alongside your cloaking plugin: the plugin keeps managing links, and Clickolytics adds the revenue layer the plugin was never meant to cover — showing which of your cloaked links and which pages actually earn.
Add the revenue layer to your WordPress site: drop in Clickolytics's script and see which links and pages earn — cookielessly, alongside whatever cloaking plugin you already use. See how it works →
Frequently asked questions
What's the best way to manage affiliate links in WordPress? A cloaking plugin for tidy, centrally-editable links, paired with tracking so you know how they perform — and revenue tracking on top to know what earns.
Should I cloak affiliate links? Yes for management — shorter, editable, tidy. But still disclose and mark links sponsored; cloaking isn't concealment.
Do affiliate plugins track earnings? Most don't — they count clicks. Revenue needs your clicks joined to your commissions.
Do I need a plugin to add affiliate links? No, but once you have many links across many posts, a cloaking plugin saves real time.
Related reading
- Affiliate Analytics: The Complete Guide — the stack WordPress plugins sit at the bottom of.
- Affiliate Revenue Attribution Explained — how to get from clicks to per-page revenue.
- How to Track Affiliate Links — every tracking method compared.
- Glossary: link cloaking and nofollow / sponsored.