Affiliate marketing is a reliable way to make money online. If you run a website on WordPress, you can find affiliate marketing plugins that will make your life easier. These tools are essential to manage links, track referrals, and grow your affiliate program without complicated coding.
The affiliate marketing plugins are the best thing you can have on your site for affiliate marketing purposes. After exploring the article, you will be able to choose one of the best plugins that fits your needs. We are going to explain the unique features of each of the plugins in simple words.
By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to choose an appropriate affiliate marketing plugin to maximize your earnings. Let’s get in!
Affiliate marketing plugins help you run affiliate programs and manage affiliate links on your WordPress website. In affiliate marketing, you (as an affiliate) promote products for other companies and earn a commission from each sale made through the referral link.
An affiliate plugin keeps track of clicks and records sales and often manages payouts. With an affiliate plugin, your WordPress site can become a powerhouse of affiliate marketing. Using these plugins has many benefits. For example, they allow you to have your own affiliate program. You keep all your commissions without any additional fees or middlemen.
Plugins will often also provide dashboards and reports so you can see which products, pages, or links earn you the most. Smarter decisions will help to focus on the right work. Making link upgrades or tweaking the links via email are automated tasks that save a lot of time and eliminate errors. Affiliate plugins help you to set up, track, and grow your affiliate earnings on WordPress.
Using affiliate plugins brings big advantages for your marketing efforts:
Easy Management: It is easy to manage the dashboard as you can add, approve or delete affiliates. Many plugins offer affiliates access to your website, allowing them to create their own login area and view their stats.
Automated Tracking: Plugins take care of it all. A unique code or cookie is assigned to each affiliate link, making it easy to tell who made a sale.
Branded Links and Cloaking: Long affiliate URLs can look spammy through branded links and cloaking. Plugins like Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates transform them into compact, branded URLs. These look cleaner, are easier to share, and build trust.
Detailed Reports: Discover clicks, conversions, and which ad performed the best! Many of the plugins include charts or exportable reports to let you know which affiliates and products are performing. This data helps you double down on what’s working.
Customization: You control commissions and rules. Want percentage or flat-fee payments? Recurring subscriptions? Some plugins support all these options. You own all data and can customize the program to your needs.
Scalability: Good plugins handle unlimited affiliates and unlimited links. You can grow your program with dozens or thousands of partners without slowing down your site.
Integration: Most reliable tools enable integration with other platforms. When someone makes a purchase in your WooCommerce store or signs up via an email form, you automatically earn the commission.
No Extra Fees: You control your affiliate program and get to keep your money. You only pay for the plugin itself (if it’s premium), but then there are no per-sale fees like on some networks.
Affiliate plugins operate mostly behind the scenes. Here’s a simplified scenario of how they work:
Affiliate Signup & Tracking: You or your affiliates install the plugin on WordPress. Affiliates sign up and get unique referral links. The plugin sets a cookie on the visitor’s browser when they click a referral link.
Link Redirection: When a visitor uses an affiliate link, the plugin redirects them to the actual product page while recording the click. Many plugins support different redirect types like 301, 302, etc.
Sale Tracking: If the visitor buys something or completes a desired action within a certain time, the plugin records the conversion. It knows which affiliate brought that sale by the cookie or URL parameter. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and other platforms integrate easily to log purchases.
Commission Calculations: The plugin applies your commission settings, like percentage, fixed fee, recurring, etc., and credits the affiliate. These stats appear in the affiliate’s dashboard and yours.
Payout Management: Good plugins either integrate with payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, or at least list pending commissions. Some even allow one-click payouts of all approved commissions.
Reporting & Notifications: You and your affiliates get reports on clicks, sales, and earnings. Plugins often send email notifications when a sale occurs or a payout is processed.
Link Management: If the product’s URL changes, link management plugins let you update it in one place and automatically fix all across your site. This keeps your affiliate links working long-term.
Affiliate plugins plug into your WordPress site and automate the whole affiliate workflow: tracking visitors, converting sales, calculating rewards, and keeping everyone informed. You still need to create great content and promote products, but these tools handle the bookkeeping and tech details.
Let’s explore some best WordPress affiliate marketing plugins that help you to organize your affiliate program and allow you to make money easily and effectively.
AffiliatePress is the modern WordPress affiliate plugin built by the team of BookingPress. It’s designed to help you build your own affiliate marketing program to track sales, automate payments, manage multiple smart commission structures, and scale your business through referrals. Support multiple industries, for example, online stores, e-learning platforms, or membership sites etc.
AffiliatePress has all the conversion-focused features you need. You can track every referral and commission with detailed insights, real-time charts, and reports. It comes with a beginner-friendly interface to manage your affiliates, approve new signups, update profiles, and track performance from one dashboard.
The plugin offers flexible commission rules and types to fit in with the goals of all types of affiliates. With multiple smart commission structures, you can decide your own commission rates based on product, categories, or performance, and go from tiered, lifetime to recurring commissions easily whenever you want. AffiliatePress lets you payout with one click and automatic payments instantly via popular gateways like PayPal or Stripe.
Importantly, there are no network or middleman fees. It’ll be just you and your affiliates spitting revenue. AffiliatePress also has advanced features, like fraud detection. It automatically tracks all suspicious activity, like fake clicks or bots, to protect your affiliate program. So all these together make AffiliatePress a perfect choice for any business that wants to grow, automate, and scale their business through referrals.
AzonPress is a powerful WordPress affiliate marketing plugin built by the great WPManageNinja team. It’s especially designed for users who want to maximize their affiliate earnings on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other platforms without the technical headaches. Whether you’re running a niche blog, review site, or product comparison platform, AzonPress makes it effortless to create high-converting affiliate content that looks great and performs even better.
One of its biggest advantages? Zero API dependency, which means you can keep adding products without worrying about API limits or approval delays. It allows you to edit and update literally everything, including content, images, and pricing, which helps improve the SEO.
With AzonPress, you can design customizable comparison tables, best-seller lists, and product grids to showcase items in a visually engaging way that boosts clicks and conversions.
Its customizable layouts give you complete control over how your affiliate products appear, while link management keeps your affiliate links organized and up-to-date. With geotargeting, you can automatically direct visitors to their local Amazon store, increasing the chances of a purchase. Plus, advanced reporting lets you track performance and optimize your strategy for maximum ROI.
If you want to turn your WordPress site into a revenue-generating Amazon affiliate hub, AzonPress is a must-try.
The developers of Easy Digital Downloads created AffiliateWP, the best premium affiliate program plugin. You may launch a self-hosted affiliate program in just minutes with AffiliateWP and sell anything from physical products to digital downloads to memberships. It works with well-known membership and e-commerce plugins (WooCommerce, EDD, MemberPress, etc.), so sales and referrals are tracked by default.
With AffiliateWP, you can approve new affiliates yourself or let the system do it for you. It sets up an affiliate dashboard on the front end. Each affiliate can see their referrals, visits, payouts, and performance charts. Affiliates don’t need to ask you to self-manage.
With one-time, recurring, tiered, or lifetime commissions, you can set smart commissions rules with total control over how you reward sales. For example, you can offer 30% on the initial sale and 5% on recurring monthly memberships. AffiliateWP lets you payout affiliates via Stripe or PayPal with just 1-click. Save hours of paying your affiliates manually.
There are no hidden fees per transaction. AffiliateWP also provides fraud detection to prevent fake referrals. This affiliate marketing plugin allows you to set up everything only once. After that, it keeps track of your clicks, records your sales, and also builds affiliate landing pages for you. All in all, AffiliateWP is a great plugin for any business that wants an affiliate system on their WordPress website that can scale.
SliceWP is a versatile WordPress affiliate plugin that is easy to use. It functions smoothly with various essential plugins such as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Paid Memberships Pro, and others. That is why it is an especially good fit for WooCommerce stores.
SliceWP allows unlimited affiliates and tracking of referrals. You can opt to approve all affiliates manually or auto-register new customers as affiliates. The plugin generates registration and login pages for affiliates automatically. Each affiliate will have a unique interface from which they can get their referral link and check their earnings.
SliceWP allows for percentage and fixed rate commissions. You can also choose who gets credit if the person switches affiliates (first click or last click). Affiliates receive email alerts as it is built in, letting them know when they’ve earned a commission.
SliceWP addresses special use cases, too. For example, you can assign WooCommerce per-product commission rates or join an affiliate link to coupon codes. SliceWP makes it easy to set up and optimize affiliate programs or offerings with solid tracking and useful add-ons at an affordable price.
Pretty Links is a popular link management plugin designed for affiliate marketers. Its main goal is to shorten, cloak, and track your affiliate links. Instead of using ugly, long affiliate URLs, you create links on your own domain. For example, yoursite.com/go/product, which redirects to the actual product page.
Pretty Links packs many features to boost your affiliate strategy. It automatically replaces keywords in your content with affiliate links, so you don’t have to add every link by hand. It supports multiple redirect types (301, 302, 307), which can help with SEO and tracking. There’s a built-in link cloaker so visitors see your branded URL, not a messy affiliate link, which increases trust.
The plugin also offers click tracking and reports. You can see how many times each link was clicked and from which sources, right from your dashboard. Additionally, Pretty Links can even show eye-catching product displays or customized checkout links for your own products.
For affiliate marketers, Pretty Links is especially handy because it opens the affiliate marketing doors for everyone. No matter your platform, you can use it to brand and share links. If you ever need to change a destination, you simply update the target URL in Pretty Links, and all existing shortened links update automatically.
ThirstyAffiliates is another leading affiliate link management plugin for WordPress. It’s designed for bloggers and marketers who want to organize, cloak, and track affiliate links from one dashboard. With over 400,000 downloads, it has become a favorite among affiliate marketers. ThirstyAffiliates lets you quickly create a library of links with categories and images so you can insert them into posts.
ThirstyAffiliates, like Pretty Links, converts ugly URLs into clean and clickable links. It automatically replaces keywords or phrases with your affiliate links throughout your site, greatly boosting your residual income. For instance, when you tag the product name, ThirstyAffiliates automatically adds your affiliate URL to that text whenever it appears.
The plugin also has advanced tools: it can target users by geolocation. This means sending visitors from different countries to country-specific affiliate pages. There’s a proactive link fixer to catch broken affiliate links, and an automatic 404 checker so you never miss a broken link. If you use Google Analytics, ThirstyAffiliates integrates with MonsterInsights to push click data into your analytics.
Importantly, ThirstyAffiliates makes site-wide link management easy. You can change the URL of a link in one place, and it updates all across your posts. ThirstyAffiliates also offers reports and charts so you can see which links get clicks.
Bit Form is primarily a WordPress form builder plugin, but it earned a spot on our list because forms can play a key role in affiliate marketing. Bit Form is an advanced, lightweight contact/form builder that offers multi-step forms, calculations, and payment integrations. It has a drag-and-drop interface with 40+ field types and 51+ integrations, including WooCommerce, Mailchimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and more.
In an affiliate marketing context, with Bit Form, you can create a lead capture form or an affiliate registration form. For example, you might use it to build an email opt-in form so that visitors interested in a product join your newsletter list. You can then send these subscribers targeted affiliate offers later. Because Bit Form integrates with major email services and e-commerce tools, you could also request a quote or order form that leads into an affiliate funnel.
Another use case is combining Bit Form with affiliate plugins via automation. For example, a form entry could trigger an action in your affiliate system, like registering a new affiliate or tagging a user. Some marketers use advanced form plugins like Bit Form to redirect users to affiliate links after submission, or even embed affiliate widgets inside forms.
You might use it to gather customer information, run contests, or funnel people into your affiliate sales pages. Its conditional logic and payment fields help you to create a semi-transactional flow where a user can pay you a small fee, like a lead magnet, and get referred to a partner product.
While Bit Form won’t track affiliate commissions, it provides the building blocks (forms, data) that power many affiliate campaigns. And with its free version, you can explore basic features without any cost.
Easy Affiliate is a full-featured affiliate program plugin built by the makers of MemberPress. It’s designed to be an all-in-one self-hosted affiliate solution for WordPress and WooCommerce sites. If you run an online store or membership site on WordPress and want an in-house affiliate program, Easy Affiliate has everything you need.
Affiliates get a sleek dashboard where they monitor live statistics, access creative assets (links, banners), and earnings. It is also compatible with email marketing services such as Mailchimp and ConvertKit, so you can automatically inform affiliates.
The plugin includes fraud detection and one-click payouts via PayPal. This means you’ll be alerted to suspicious affiliate activity, and you can pay all affiliates in one go.
Easy Affiliate offers tiered commissions and full creative control. You can upload unlimited link and banner creatives for your affiliates to use. The commission settings are very flexible, and you can override rates per affiliate if needed.
Easy Affiliate helps WordPress store owners increase their sales. It lets you focus on selling more instead of linking tracking, reporting, payments, and onboarding. It’s got everything you need to create, monitor, and manage your very own self-hosted affiliate program.
Affiliate marketing can be a powerful revenue stream for WordPress sites, and the right plugin makes all the difference. In this guide, we explored some of the best WordPress affiliate marketing plugins available today.
No matter your niche or budget, there’s a WordPress plugin to fit. Many of the tools we listed have free versions or trials, so you can test them out. Remember that success comes from using the plugin as part of a solid marketing strategy: pick quality products, write helpful content, and treat your audience with respect. The affiliate plugins do the heavy lifting of tracking and management, freeing you to focus on content and relationships.
I hope this friendly guide helps you find the perfect affiliate marketing plugin for your WordPress site. With these tools, your site can become a commission-earning machine!
It’s a plugin that helps you run or improve affiliate marketing on your site. It can manage your own affiliate program or handle affiliate links. It automates affiliate tracking, link management, and reporting so you don’t have to do it manually.
Yes. Many plugins offer free versions with basic features. These can be enough for beginner affiliates. You may eventually upgrade to premium for advanced tracking or reporting.
Most are built to work with any modern WordPress theme. They typically add their pages automatically. They also generally run on all hosts.
Consider your needs: If you want to run your own affiliate program, look at full solutions like AffiliateWP, Easy Affiliate, or Ultimate Affiliate Pro. If you mostly need to manage links on a content site, focus on Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates.
Once you install a link management plugin, you can usually insert links by using a new button in the post editor or a shortcode. If using an affiliate program plugin, affiliates can often paste HTML banners or links they got from the plugin into posts. The process is usually very easy.
Have you ever visited a website, tried to use a plugin or service, and felt completely stuck because there was no documentation page on the site? This problem is not only frustrating for users, but it slowly becomes a nightmare for site owners, too. Let me be honest with you, I’ve been in this situation […]
Imagine building your dream home. You could visit multiple stores, buying hammers from one shop, nails from another, and paint from a third. Or you could walk into one expert home improvement store that gives you everything you need at a fraction of the cost. That’s exactly what WordPress plugin bundles offer, complete toolkits that […]
Imagine spending your days clicking and copy-pasting between apps, then discovering a plugin that handles all that work for you. WordPress automation plugins promise to connect your site, forms, and stores to hundreds of apps, triggering actions instantly when events occur. This saves bloggers, marketers, and developers countless hours. But with many tools on the […]
