Do you want to hide affiliate links on your WordPress site? Not sure what link cloaking means? In this article, we will explain what link cloaking is and how you can hide affiliate links in WordPress.
Link cloaking is a technique used to convert long affiliate links into a shorter, more branded link.
Affiliate links are often long, hard to remember, and display your username or affiliate ID like this:
http://www.affiliatesite.com/products/?product_id=123&affiliate=123
Link cloaking allows you to shorten these long, ugly links to branded URLs like these:
http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname
You can use anything as the base URL. We use refer in our hidden links on WPBeginner. Some other popular URL bases are out, go, recommend, etc.
If you are someone who uses affiliate links on their blogs to earn money, then you should hide the links. Many site owners cloak links to properly manage their affiliate links.
Link cloaking allows you to create easy-to-understand URLs for your outgoing affiliate links. It can also help you add an extra layer of click tracking to make sure you get paid for every sale you refer.
You can also protect your affiliate links from being hijacked by using link cloaking. Lastly, hidden links allow you to easily manage your affiliate links from your WordPress admin interface.
If you don't like the video or need more instructions, continue reading.
As affiliate marketing is a major source of income for many bloggers, there are many WordPress plugins available that allow you to hide your affiliate links and easily manage them.
We have selected some of the best WordPress link cloaking plugins for you.
You can use any of these plugins to easily add your affiliate links to WordPress and cloak them for maximum benefits.
ThirstyAffiliates is one of the best affiliate link manager and link hiding plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily add your affiliate links in WordPress and manage them from a single dashboard.
You can insert your affiliate links into any WordPress post or page from the buttons on the post editor screen.
Another great feature is that it can automatically replace selected keywords with affiliate links. Aside from that, you can choose the base URL, automatically nofollow links, A/B test your offers, geo-target your offers, get statistics, and much more.
We use ThirstyAffiliates on WPBeginner. See our guide on how to add affiliate links in WordPress using ThirstyAffiliates.
Pretty Link Lite is another WordPress link cloaking plugin. It allows you to easily manage your affiliate links. It can automatically add a nofollow tag to affiliate links, shorten the links and redirect them properly.
Pretty Link Lite also provides analytics with an easier way to remove the oldest hits from your database. This ensures that these visit logs do not take up too much space in your database and backup files.
Easy Affiliate Links is an easy to use link hiding plugin for affiliate marketers. It allows you to hide links, add and manage all your affiliate links from a single panel.
Basically it has all the features you would want from a link management plugin with a nicer and simpler interface.
WP Wizard Cloak is another WordPress affiliate link management plugin. It includes all the whistles and bells you would need from an affiliate link management tool.
It provides URL shortening and link hiding with easy to use tools to add and manage your affiliate links in WordPress.
Links Auto Replacer is a bit different than most of the other plugins on the list. As the name suggests, its main use is to automatically add links for certain keywords. You can manage your links and add new links just like any other link management plugin.
As its name suggests, the WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links plugin is for eCommerce sites built on the WooCommerce platform.
This plugin automatically hides all external links on a WooCommerce site. You can choose a URL slug by visiting Settings »Permalinks page. You can also change the type of redirect. But that's it, this plugin is not a link manager so you cannot use it to add or manage your affiliate links.
The Affiliate Link Manager plugin takes a different approach to cloaking links. It does not add a URL base like most of the other plugins on the list. Instead, it allows you to use a keyword as the URL slug for the cloaked link. In terms of features it is very limited, but it gets the job done. It also offers some basic statistics for your hidden link views.
We hope this article has helped you learn how to hide links on your WordPress site. You can also check out our list of the 10 best affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress.
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