Managing your affiliate links across even a single WordPress website can quickly get away from you if you don’t keep tabs on all the links scattered through posts, pages, and widgets. There’s potentially hours of manual work to do hunting through content: while some links break without warning, you’ll need to find the data to prove others will perform well. I’m going to run through a LinkCentral discovery – a WordPress plugin that can help you tackle these challenges.

Discovering LinkCentral: How It Solves Your Link Management Problems

LinkCentral lets you organize your links, create custom URLs, and update them through a single dashboard. When you need to change a destination URL, you update it once and the change applies everywhere that link appears on your site.

There are a few options to control that link behavior:

• You can schedule links to activate at specific times for campaign launches.
• You’re able to password protect links for scenarios that need exclusive access.
• There’s the ability to send visitors to different destinations based on different variables. This could be country, device type, time of day, and user login status.

This level of control helps you run targeted campaigns and time-sensitive offers without creating multiple versions of the same content.

Discovering LinkCentral: Free Features and Functionality 

LinkCentral’s foundation is a custom URL shortener that will turn unwieldy affiliate links into clean, memorable addresses using your own domain. So, a link such as www.complex-affiliate-link.com/page?tag=value&etc becomes www.yoursite.com/go/custom-slug where you control both the prefix (go) and the slug (custom-slug).

The tracking system logs each click and lets you see the total number of clicks, unique visitors, geographic locations, device types, and referral sources. This data sits alongside your links in your WordPress dashboard rather than scattered across external analytics platforms. However, the plugin integrates with Google Analytics 4 if you want to send tracking data to your existing analytics setup (although the built-in analytics are pretty good!)

To help you manage your growing library of affiliate URLs, you can use a number of different elements:

• Categories let you group related links together while private notes attach context to individual links. The search and filter options help you locate specific links quickly even when you manage hundreds of URLs.
• Import tools bring your existing links in from ThirstyAffiliates, Pretty Links, and MTS URL Shortener with one-click migrations. This is great for switching systems without having to rebuild your entire link library.

Speaking of connecting other tools, LinkCentral offers page builder integrations too. You can use the Site Editor, Elementor, Beaver Builder, and even the Classic Editor. With the excellent documentation to hand, you can ensure you’re ready to roll within minutes, regardless of your setup.

Finally, I like that you can create QR codes from your links, which will generate scannable codes usable with a single click. You can download these as PNG files for use in print materials, presentations, or anywhere else you need offline-to-online conversion tracking.

Premium Features for Targeted Marketing

The premium version (I’ll talk about pricing shortly) gives you some extra capabilities for more complex marketing scenarios.

For example, dynamic redirects will send visitors to different destinations based on conditions such as the date, time of day, country, device type, cookie presence, user login status, user role, or URL parameters.

This flexibility supports geo-targeted campaigns, so your European visitors will see different products than American visitors, as just one example.

There are a few other premium goodies that I want to highlight:

• Split testing rotates visitors between different destinations so you can compare which offer converts better.
• The broken links checker scans your links and sends email notifications when destinations return errors.
• Auto-keyword linking connects specified keywords to your affiliate URLs. This works in the background to add links to new content as you publish it. It also updates old content with new links as you add them to the system.

Of course, this isn’t all LinkCentral offers, so I’d encourage you to check out the full feature set and look over the pricing.

Discovering LinkCentral: Pricing Options That Fit Your Needs

LinkCentral’s free version gives you substantial functionality, but a premium plan is the best option if you want the most bang for your buck:

• A single-site license costs either $49.99 per year or $149.99 as a one-time lifetime payment.
• Three-site access is $99.99 annually or $249.99 for lifetime use.
• $164.99 per year gives you ten site licenses with no lifetime licensing. However…
• …there is a lifetime offer that gives you as many licenses as you need for $299.99.

The great news is that every premium plan includes the entire feature set of LinkCentral. As you’ll know if you read the WP Mayor blog regularly, this is what I like to see! It’s also worth noting that you’re able to transfer those licenses between sites and any site not your live ‘production’ environment doesn’t count towards the license count.

My Thoughts on LinkCentral

I haven’t seen many good affiliate link management solutions in a while, so LinkCentral is a breath of fresh air. The free version provides genuine utility and the premium offering is substantial in all the right areas. Given the adaptable licensing, a three-site plan (or even the practically unlimited lifetime deal) provides the best value.

My opinion from this LinkCentral discovery post is clear, but what about you? Share your thoughts about how LinkCentral will aid your affiliate link management in the comments section below!