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8+ Best WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Marketers (2024)

best affiliate marketing plugins

Are you an affiliate marketer looking to generate more revenue from your website?

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online. With the right set of affiliate marketing WordPress plugins, you can quickly increase the revenue from your website.

At IsItWP, we always test all the plugins ourselves before creating a list. This ensures that we give you a first-hand experience of what to expect from tools. We also look at third-party review websites to see what others are saying about the tools.

We rank them according to price, ease of use, features, pros & cons, and customization. This ensures that you have a clear picture of what the tool can do and what to expect.

In this article, we’ll share some of the best WordPress plugins we have tested or used for affiliate marketers. We will also give you bonus tools to help you further with affiliate management.

Choosing WordPress Affiliate Marketing Plugins for Your Site

Affiliate marketing is one of the most reliable ways to make money online. With affiliate marketing, affiliate marketers choose products they like, promote them online, and earn commissions when someone purchases them through their referral link.

On the other hand, you get high-quality sales without actually looking for clients yourself. The best part is that since potential customers hear about your product from someone else, they are more likely to trust you and purchase it.

Here are other reasons to consider affiliate marketing.

  • Increased Traffic: Affiliates use various channels like blogs, social media, email newsletters, and more to drive traffic back to your site. This exposes your website to more high-quality visitors.
  • Cost-Effective Marketing: Since affiliates are only paid when they bring in sales or leads, affiliate marketing is a low-risk investment. You don’t need to spend upfront on ads—you only pay for successful results.
  • Easy Scalability: You can quickly scale your marketing efforts by simply recruiting more affiliates. You can grow your affiliate network without requiring significant time or effort as your business grows.
  • Improved SEO: With this marketing technique, affiliates share your products on different platforms. As a result, you gain backlinks and increased brand visibility, boosting your search engine ranking.

But with so many affiliate marketing tools out there, it can be hard to find one that meets your needs. Having the right plugins in your toolbox makes affiliate marketing easy and helps you earn more revenue from your site.

Here are features you should look for when looking for an affiliate plugin.

  • Easy Affiliate Management: Choose a plugin that lets you easily add, approve, or remove affiliates. It should also allow setting custom commission rates for individuals or groups.
  • Affiliate Registration & Approval: Look for a tool with customizable affiliate registration forms and options for automatic or manual approval, giving you control over who joins.
  • Real-Time Reporting & Analytics: The plugin should provide real-time tracking of affiliate performance, including clicks, referrals, sales, and earnings, helping you optimize your program.
  • Customizable Affiliate Links: Select a plugin that allows affiliates to create and manage custom referral links. Bonus points if it lets them create posts or pages to boost promotion.
  • Automated Payments: Ensure the plugin supports automatic payment of commissions through trusted gateways, saving time and ensuring prompt payments.
  • Integrations with Popular Plugins: Make sure the plugin integrates smoothly with platforms like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or MemberPress for accurate tracking of sales and commissions.

Best WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Marketers

Now that you have seen the reasons to use affiliate marketing and what to look for in a plugin, let us get into the list. We will break down features, pros & cons, and pricing for each affiliate plugin listed below. We have also listed bonus tools that are not directly affiliate tools but can help you improve your marketing efforts.

If you do not have time to go through the entire article, check out the table below for our top 3 picks of the best affiliate program plugins.

🥇 1st Choice

🥈2nd Choice

🥉3rd Choice

affiliatewp logo
prettylinks logo
thirstyaffiliates logo

Pricing: Starting from $149.60/ Year.

Pricing: Starting from $99.60/ Year.

Pricing:  Starting from $99.60/ Year.

  • Personalize affiliate management
  • Concise affiliate tracking
  • Front-end affiliate dashboard

Read More »

  • Shorten and cloak long affiliate URLs
  • Multiple redirection types
  •  Allows group links

Read More »

  • Replace keywords with affiliate links automatically
  • Import affiliate links
  • Categorize affiliate links

Read More »

With that said, let us get into the list.

1. AffiliateWP

affiliatewp homepage

AffiliateWP is the best affiliate management plugin for WordPress. It’s developed by the same folks behind the renowned Easy Digital Downloads plugin, which is listed as one of our best WordPress eCommerce plugins.

If you’re selling a product on your WordPress website and want to create a fully-fledged self-hosted affiliate program, then AffiliateWP is the answer.

AffiliateWP is easy to set up and even allows you to add your affiliates manually or automatically, making it great for beginners and bloggers.

It comes with an easy-to-use dashboard.

Here, you will conveniently find all the important affiliate marketing metrics in your WordPress backend. With it, you can track your conversion rate, the number of visitors, actual referrals, and more.

admin overview affiliatewp

You can also track referral links and affiliate coupons and keep track of cross-domain promotions without coding experience. These metrics also help make it easy to create an affiliate marketing funnel so that you can streamline your processes.

Apart from that, AffiliateWP allows you to create an affiliate dashboard where your affiliates can track performance. Here, they can access their statistics, payouts, referrals, visits, and more.

The best part is that your affiliates access their affiliate area from the front end, maintaining your security.

statistics affiliate area

Now, as mentioned, AffiliateWP allows you to automate affiliate registration or do it manually. We should also mention that you can customize their registration, onboarding, and payment processes as well.

But the customizations for this WordPress plugin for affiliate marketing do not end there. With it, you can also customize and brand your affiliate’s team dashboard. This allows you to show them only the affiliate metrics that apply to them.

Since the affiliate dashboard provides you with information on each affiliate member, you can authorize one-click payouts.

This ensures your affiliate team gets their money instantly.

But, for added convenience, AffiliateWP comes with smart commission rules. With this feature, you can set up 1-time payments, recurring, tired, lifetime, and more payments.

Now, if you want to motivate your top affiliate marketers, AffiliateWP allows you to create competitions on your WordPress site. You can also showcase a leaderboard where everyone can easily see who ranks the highest. This can also help you be more transparent with your team, as everyone can see how the other is performing.

On top of this, AffiliateWP can create custom affiliate landing pages that can help you convert. This is the perfect opportunity to showcase your products in a straightforward way, making AffiliateWP perfect for high-ticket affiliate marketing products.

But, most importantly, AffiliateWP comes with smart fraud detection to help you protect your investment and avoid losses. This feature tracks all your affiliate links and ensures nobody attempts to manipulate them.

Pros:

  • We’ve found AffiliateWP to be incredibly flexible. It allows us to personalize affiliate registration, referral links, and even affiliate areas.
  • We love the cookie expiration customization and direct link tracking features. We have had no trouble ensuring affiliates get credit for their referrals, even when conversions happen weeks later.
  • The front-end affiliate dashboard is a standout feature. Affiliates can manage their accounts without accessing the backend, ensuring ease of use and maintaining site security.
  • When installing AffiliateWP, key pages like affiliate registration and login are automatically created, which saves time and ensures a quick setup.
  • The Payouts Service integration simplifies the payment process. This lets us make affiliate payments directly from our WordPress dashboard without juggling different tools.
  • Instant access to affiliate statistics through real-time reports gives us reliable data to monitor performance and earnings quickly.

Cons:

  • The flexibility and many customization options can be overwhelming for beginners. It took us a bit of trial and error to configure everything to our liking.
  • AffiliateWP does not offer a free version of the plugin. But we like the 14-day money-back guarantee, with no questions asked, that allows us to test it out before making a purchase.

Check out our AffiliateWP review here.

Get started with Affiliate WP today!

Pricing: Starting from $149.60/ Year.

2. Pretty Links

pretty links homepage

Pretty Links is a powerful WordPress affiliate plugin that enables you to easily cloak the affiliate links you promote on your website. This can help you display branded links, increasing your conversion rate. At the same time, the shorter affiliate URL ensures your site does not look spammy. Because of its features, Pretty Links is one of the best link management tools to help you keep track of all your affiliate activities.

It even allows you to easily set up server-side redirection, including permanent 301 and temporary 302/307 redirects.

Moreover, Pretty Links also helps you create short links automatically for your posts and pages and share them on your Twitter with a customizable message.

Pros:

  • Allows us to easily shorten and cloak long affiliate URLs, turning them into branded, readable links.
  • This affiliate plugin supports multiple redirection types like 301, 302, and 307. This gives us the flexibility to manage temporary and permanent redirects.
  • We like the detailed tracking system. It provides insights into link clicks, traffic sources, and user data.
  • Pretty Links allows us to group links. This is a great feature for keeping everything organized and managing a large number of affiliate links.
  • Pretty Links lets us create shortlinks using our own domain, adding an extra level of trust and brand consistency when sharing URLs.

Cons:

  • While the free version of Pretty Links provides basic link management, you need a premium version to access the pro features.
  • There’s no built-in way for clients or partners to access the links from the front end, making collaboration challenging.

Check out our Pretty Links review here.

Get started with Pretty Links today!

Pricing: Starting from $99.60/ Year.

3. ThirstyAffiliates

thirsty affiliates homepage

ThirstyAffiliates is a must-use WordPress affiliate plugin for marketers that lets you organize all your affiliate links in a single place. With ThirstyAffiliates, finding and replacing your affiliate links won’t be a hassle.

For example, whenever you want to change an affiliate link, you don’t need to dig deeper into your site and manually alter those URLs. Instead, you simply do that in your ThirstyAffiliates panel, which will automatically change all the published URLs.

It also allows for link cloaking, turning your ugly-looking long URLs into shorter, pretty-looking links. The other neat thing about ThirstyAffiliates is that it can automatically replace any keyword with an affiliate link, allowing you to earn more from your site.

Pros:

  • ThirstyAffiliates allows us to manage all affiliate links from one dashboard, making updating or replacing links across multiple posts easy.
  • The link cloaking feature lets us turn long, unattractive URLs into branded, clean links.
  • One of our favorite features is the ability to replace specific keywords with affiliate links automatically.
  • Instead of manually recreating links on a new site, we can simply import the existing ones.
  • We can easily categorize affiliate links, keeping everything well-organized.

Cons:

  • Need the pro version to access all features.
  • No built-in way to display affiliate links on the front end.

Check out our ThirstyAffiliates review here.

Get started with ThirstyAffiliates today!

Pricing: Starting from $99.60/ Year.

4. OptinMonster

optinmonster homepage

OptinMonster is the best lead generation and WordPress popup plugin for your affiliate website.

With OptinMonster, you can show a personalized popup campaign based on individual visitors’ behaviors, making your messages more likely to convert. For example, on a product review page, you can show a popup with an affiliate link promoting the same product.

On top of this, this lead generation plugin can help you increase revenue through popups triggered based on other factors like location, device, scroll depth, and more.

These targeted campaigns can ensure that the affiliate links display for the most relevant users, increasing conversions. Since these targeted campaigns are displayed to the right users at the right time, they result in less annoyance.

You can seamlessly integrate your email newsletter. OptinMonster lets you quickly connect your favorite email marketing service to grow your email list while growing your affiliate revenue. You can connect it to Constant Contact, AWeber, Brevo, and more.

Pros:

  • OptinMonster excels at targeting specific visitor behaviors.
  • We love how effortlessly it integrates with popular email marketing services.
  • Its drag-and-drop campaign builder is intuitive and flexible.
  • Features like the “Spin-to-Win” wheel make it fun to engage users.
  • Comes with 700+ templates to help you start building campaigns with ease.

Cons:

  • While the setup is relatively easy, beginners might still find the depth of options and targeting rules overwhelming.
  • Unlike other WordPress plugins, we need to sign up for an external OptinMonster account, which may feel like an extra step.

Check out our OptinMonster review here.

Get started with OptinMonster today!

Pricing: Starting from $7/ Month.

Want to start with the free version instead? Try OptinMonster Lite.

5. WPForms

wpforms homepage

WPForms is one of the best contact form plugins for WordPress and it allows you to easily create contact forms on your affiliate website.

Potential customers are more likely to purchase a product recommended by people they know. Having a contact form on your site makes it easy for your visitors to reach out to you. WPForms also lets you easily integrate your form with the best email marketing services so you can build connections with your visitors.

By building a connection with your visitors, you can recommend products and convince them to make a purchase.

Pros:

  • The built-in spam protection features, including CAPTCHA and customizable filters, help us maintain the integrity of our submissions.
  • Conditional Logic enhances user engagement by displaying relevant questions based on previous answers.
  • The drag-and-drop builder makes building a contact form or any other form very simple.
  • Comes with over 1900 templates, ensuring you can find one to build any type of form you want.
  • The ability for users to save their progress and return later is valuable to ensure more completed forms.
  • We love how WPForms easily integrates with popular email marketing services, payment gateways, and CRM tools.

Cons:

  • While WPForms offers a free version, many advanced features and addons need a premium version.
  • We found that there is a bit of a learning curve when mastering advanced features like conditional logic.

Check out our WPForms review here.

Get started with WPForms today!

Pricing: Starting from $49.50/ Year.

Want to start with the free version instead? Try WPForms Lite.

6. AdSanity

AdSanity

AdSanity provides an easy way to insert affiliate banners inside posts or sidebar widgets. You can manage your affiliate campaigns and ads within your WordPress admin panel.

The main benefit of using AdSanity is you can display affiliate banners only during a specified timeframe on your website. With its performance report, you can easily track the performance of each banner you publish on your site.

Pros:

  • The core plugin is lightweight, ensuring it doesn’t slow down your website.
  • The plugin provides various ad display options, including widgets, shortcodes, and template tags.
  • Conditional Ad Appearance allows affiliates to control when and where ads are displayed based on specific conditions.
  • AdSanity supports Google Analytics tracking, enabling you to monitor ad performance effectively.

Cons:

  • While AdSanity excels in basic affiliate management, it lacks some advanced functionalities found in other affiliate management plugins. This is because it is more focused on ad management.
  • The advanced addons are only available for higher plans.

Check out our AdSanity review here.

Get started with AdSanity today!

Pricing: Starting from $59/ Year.

7. Easy Affiliate

easy affiliate homepage

Easy Affiliate is a popular affiliate management plugin for WordPress. It’s a complete solution that allows you to add an affiliate marketing program to your website.

This helps monitor and manage your clicks, sales, payments, and more. Easy Affiliate is a user-friendly plugin that takes a few minutes to set up without editing any code.

It has an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard, so it’s easy for anyone, including beginners, to create an affiliate program for their small businesses.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers. We believe that all of the above plugins are essentials and must-haves for anyone involved in the WordPress affiliate marketing business.

Pros:

  • Its simple affiliate program management dashboard provides easy access to key statistics like clicks, sales, and payouts.
  • Setting up Easy Affiliate is fast and requires no coding skills.
  • The plugin integrates smoothly with popular payment solutions like PayPal, WooCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads.
  • You can set custom commission levels, giving the flexibility to tailor payouts based on affiliate performance or contract terms.
  • With PayPal’s one-click payouts, managing payments to affiliates is super easy.

Cons:

  • You need the premium plugin to access all the features.
  • This is a WordPress-only tool.

Check out our Easy Affiliate review here.

Get started with Easy Affiliate today.

Pricing: Starting from $99.60 per year.

8. WP RSS Aggregator

WP RSS Agregator

WP RSS Aggregator allows you to conveniently fetch content from your affiliate networks into your WordPress website. For example, retailers like Amazon let you create product feeds with your affiliate ID.

With WP RSS Aggregator, you can set up product pages by importing the feeds or even create auto blogs with ease. This way, you can automatically fetch products as posts into your WordPress blog. Plus, it’s always updated with the latest changes.

Pros:

  • It makes it easy to automate the import of affiliate content from sites like Amazon. This allowed us to populate our affiliate site with fresh content automatically.
  • Can handle large-scale imports, making it simple to import large product listings or affiliate offers.
  • Ensures your content remains up to date by continuously fetching and updating the affiliate feeds
  • Easily embed affiliate links by importing feeds with affiliate IDs, ensuring proper commission tracking.
  • You can customize how the imported feeds appear to ensure they match your site design.

Cons:

  • Focuses on content aggregation, meaning it lacks advanced features like affiliate management.
  • If not properly managed, importing content from multiple sources can lead to duplicate content issues.
  • Setting up this affiliate plugin requires a bit of a learning curve.

Get started with WP RSS Aggregator today!

Pricing: Starting from $79 per year.

Bonus Affiliate Marketing Tools

Now, even though the tools below are not affiliate marketing plugins per se, they still play an important role in ensuring your campaigns succeed.

1. MonsterInsights

monsterinsights homepage

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, but it also lets you enable affiliate link tracking on your website with ease.

With affiliate link tracking enabled, you’ll get data-driven insights in your Google Analytics that help you generate more revenue from your affiliate website.

  • You can identify the highest-earning pages on your site.
  • Understand the most profitable traffic sources.
  • Get content ideas for your blog geared toward earning more affiliate revenue.

With MonsterInsights, you can also track your AdSense earnings, eCommerce transactions, and download tracking in your Google Analytics account.

Pros:

  • We loved that MonsterInsights lets us view affiliate data straight from our WordPress dashboard.
  • You can track more than just affiliate data. You can also monitor eCommerce tracking, custom link tracking, form conversions, and more.
  • Setting up custom dimensions is straightforward, allowing you to track specific affiliate metrics without diving deep into Google Analytics configurations.
  • Scroll Depth Tracking provides insights into how far users scroll on specific pages.

Cons:

  • Need the pro version to access all features.
  • You need a Google Analytics account to benefit from MonsterInsights fully.

Check out our MonsterInsights review here.

Get started with MonsterInsights today!

Pricing: Starting from $99.60/ Year.

Want to start with the free version instead? Try MonsterInsights Lite.

2. Thrive Suite

Thrive Suite

Thrive Suite is THE most powerful conversion-optimization platform for affiliate websites. With its conversion tools, you can convert casual visitors into paying customers.

You’ll get premade themes and an intuitive builder with drag and drop functionality to design your website. Then, there are tons of conversion optimization tools to build lead generation forms, quizzes, online courses, and more.

You can also create evergreen scarcity campaigns to boost your sales like never before. You can add countdown timers and ribbons to your site and show them to everyone or only specific people.

The plugin works with any WordPress theme and is compatible with all popular WordPress plugins.

Pros:

  • From lead generation forms to quizzes, it provides everything needed to enhance conversion rates.
  • Through its drag and drop builder, it simplifies the process of creating engaging landing pages and sales funnels.
  • The ability to create evergreen scarcity campaigns, including countdown timers and ribbons, adds a sense of urgency. This can boost sales and conversions.

Cons:

  • While the basic tools are user-friendly, some of the more advanced features may require a learning curve.
  • Thrive Suite operates on a subscription model, which can be pricey for beginners.

Get started with Thrive Suite today!

Pricing: Starting from $149 per quarter or $299/ Year.

3. SeedProd

seedprod homepage

SeedProd is a powerful website and page builder that comes with smart blocks like social sharing, countdown timers, optin forms, and more.

You can also design and customize landing pages quickly. You can create lead squeeze pages, splash pages, product pages, and more to promote your affiliate products and really shine the spotlight on them.

It comes with powerful elements to help you get new potential leads and increase your revenue.

Over 1 million business websites are using SeedProd to create landing pages. It offers 9+ themes and 300+ landing page templates, including sales pages, coming soon and maintenance mode pages, webinar pages, optin pages, and so on.

Pros:

  • SeedProd offers an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, making it simple to build customized affiliate landing pages.
  • With over 300 templates, you can quickly build pages spotlighting your affiliate products, streamlining the marketing process.
  • SeedProd includes elements like opt-in forms, countdown timers, and social sharing buttons that can help with affiliate marketing.
  • With WooCommerce blocks, affiliates can promote and sell products directly from landing pages.

Cons:

  • While SeedProd excels as a page builder, it lacks the dedicated features of a full-fledged affiliate management plugin.

Check out our SeedProd review here.

Get started with SeedProd today!

Pricing: Starts at $39.50/ Year.

Want to start with the free version instead? Try SeedProd Lite.

4. All in One SEO

All in One SEO

All in One SEO is the best and most powerful SEO plugin on the market. It allows you to easily optimize your WordPress site to rank on search engines and beat the competition.

It’s beginner-friendly so anyone can optimize their site without hiring an SEO specialist.

You can audit your site’s SEO right from your WordPress dashboard to find errors and areas of improvement.

It has features for on-page SEO, such as keywords, rich snippets, and headline tools. Plus, it takes care of technical SEO with features like smart sitemaps, robots.txt, and canonical tags.

In addition, it lets you optimize for local SEO as well as eCommerce SEO.

Pros:

  • A quick setup wizard helps even beginners optimize their affiliate pages without needing in-depth SEO knowledge.
  • The plugin covers both on-page and technical SEO, including keywords, sitemaps, and rich snippets, making it a one-stop shop for affiliate marketers looking to boost visibility and rank higher.
  • You can integrate All in One SEO with popular WordPress plugins like WooCommerce, MemberPress, and Elementor. This helps streamline your affiliate marketing setup.
  • With the SEO feature, you can fine-tune your affiliate marketing strategy based on competitor insights.

Cons:

  • You need the pro version to access all the SEO features.

Check out our All in One SEO review here.

Get started with All in One SEO today!

Pricing: Starting from $49.60 per year.

Want to start with the free version instead? Try All in One SEO Lite.

We hope you enjoyed reading about the best WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers. If you have more questions, check out the FAQs below.

FAQs: Best WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Marketers

Is affiliate marketing a good side hustle?

Yes, affiliate marketing is considered one of the best online side hustles. This is because affiliate marketing does not need you to own a product, a website, or any other digital assets. You just need to help others sell their product, and you get a cut for it.

Can I do affiliate marketing without social media?

Absolutely! You can do affiliate marketing without social media. You can share your affiliate links anywhere you want online, from forums to your affiliate website. As long as the product owner is using a good affiliate marketing tool like AffiliateWP, they can monitor your links in real-time to ensure you get paid.

Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme?

No! Affiliate marketing is not a pyramid scheme. It is a marketing technique where product owners use affiliate marketers to help them sell their products. Every time, an affiliate marketer makes a sale, they get a commission from the product owner. A good example of this marketing system is the Amazon affiliate program.

Best free WordPress plugin for affiliate marketing?

Pretty Links is the best free affiliate marketing plugin you can use. It offers you powerful features with its free version that you can use to cloak your affiliate URL in a quick and simple way. But, if you want to unlock all its key features, you can purchase a plan from their official website.

That’s our list of the best WordPress affiliate plugins. You may also want to take a look at the 11+ Powerful WordPress Lead Generation Plugins Compared.

To add to that, here are other articles you may be interested in reading.

The first article will show you how to drive more targeted traffic, which is essential to increasing your affiliate revenue. The next post discusses how to track affiliate links in WordPress using Google Analytics. While the third article lists the 7 best Amazon Affiliate WordPress plugins and compares them.

Comments   Leave a Reply

  1. nikhil kumar chandra January 9, 2021 at 1:48 pm

    i want to know what is campaign in affiliate programs?

  2. I had a plugin years ago that allowed me to create an SEO-enhancing review in my blog. It had star ratings and I think templates. I am looking for something to replace it as I think it isn’t available now. It was called Snap Reviews Pro. I am starting a blog that will feature product reviews that I write about products on Amazon and other affiliate relationships I have. Something like this would be very helpful.

  3. I am new.
    What is the use of CATEGORY
    What if a theme does not allow one to insert category

    2. What is the use of TAGS?

    1. You might want to check out this guide on building a website where we explain everything including tags and category.

  4. What about ultimate affiliate Pro? It’s not listed here.

  5. You should have a look at Auto Affiliate Links too

    1. I’ve never come across your Auto Affiliate Links plugin. Looks like it’s worth recommending. Thanks for the suggestion, Lucian

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