Pretty Links Review: Is it the Best Link Management Plugin?

As a professional affiliate marketer when you join any affiliate program, you are provided with a unique affiliate link. You can share this link on your blog, social media or through email newsletter. 

When a reader clicks on this affiliate link and makes a purchase on the merchant site, you get a commission. The affiliate link helps to track all the clicks and sales so that you never miss your affiliate commission.

However, there is one problem with the default affiliate link.

The default affiliate links are typically long, harder to read and look very ugly. Normally an affiliate link looks like this:

https://xyzcreditcard.com/r.cgm?b=1287949&u=2513771&m=72678&urllink=&afftrack=

Pretty Links converts these long and ugly affiliate links into short, clean, memorable, and speakable links. It is also called link cloaking.

You can cloak the above link with Pretty Link to look like this:

https://technicalwall.com/recommends/xyzcreditcard

This short & brandable link can be easily shared across multiple platforms - website, social media, podcasts, email newsletters, PDF, QR Codes and others.

If you’re an affiliate marketer like me, I would always recommend you to use Pretty Links to boost your affiliate marketing efforts.

In this review, you would get to know what is Pretty Links? How to cloak, manage and share affiliate links? Is it worth it?

I’ll answer all these questions and more in my Pretty Links review below.

Note: This article contains affiliate links. When you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, we get a small compensation at no cost to you. See our Privacy Policy and Disclaimer for more info.

Pretty Links Review: Overview

Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin that works as a custom link shortener, URL redirection tool, and branded link management plugin. You have complete control over how your links look and where they redirect.

Above I have mentioned that Pretty Links can be used to cloak affiliate links. But it has many more features apart from that.

Here are some of the key features that make Pretty Links a perfect link management plugin.

1. Cloak your ugly looking affiliate links to short and easy to remember links.
2. Supports redirection (301, 302, and 307 redirects only)
3. Automatically add nofollow attributes to the cloaked links
4. Easily track all the hits and traffic the links are generating from the Dashboard
5. Create short links for your blog post or pages that are easily shared on YouTube, Twitter or Facebook
6. Can automatically replace all the non-Pretty Links URLs into Pretty Links
7. Option to add the target="_blank" attribute to all links that are automatically replaced with Pretty Links
8. Easily update redirected links to new URLs without a third party service
9. And many more features

As you can see above the possibilities are endless with Pretty Links.

Do You Even Need Pretty Links?

Pretty Links is for people who want to convert normal ugly links into brandable links that can be shared on websites, Facebook posts, twitter, podcasts, emails and others.  It helps them to clean up, brand, group, organize, and track their links. 

People who use Pretty Links include:

• Affiliate Marketers
• Podcasters
• Social Media Marketers
• YouTubers

If you’re any one of the above, Pretty Links can help you save your time and money by quickly converting your links into shareable links.

Pretty Links is particularly useful to affiliate marketers who are monetizing their websites promoting affiliate products.

It can be a very handy tool if you want to track which affiliate link is getting more clicks with additional information like the browser and the operating system.

If you want to add and manage your affiliate links at a single place, track clicks with detailed insights with the ability to post your link on multiple platforms, consider using Pretty Links.

How Pretty Links Works?

Before you start using Pretty Links, you need to buy and download the Pretty Links WordPress plugin.

After you download the plugin, it can be installed and activated in the WordPress Dashboard. If you need help, then follow our guide on how to install a plugin for detailed instructions.

Once the plugin is activated, you can start cloaking your affiliate links.

Follow the below mentioned steps to know how to use Pretty Links to cloak links:

Step 1: Login to your WordPress Dashboard, then select Add New under Pretty Links

Step 2: Under Add New Pretty Link, enter the name of your affiliate program

Step 3: Under Redirection, select redirection type from - 301 (Permanent), 302 (Temporary) and 307 (temporary). Normally as an affiliate marketer, we would choose 301 as the preferred redirection type.

Step 4: Under Target URL, enter your affiliate link code.

Step 5: Under the Pretty Link option, you can see that random 3-4 characters have been automatically generated for your URL. However, it is recommended to enter a custom slug (which is short, readable and memorable) for your URL. 

Enter your Pretty Link slug here. Normally, you would enter the code as - /refer/affiliateproduct or /go/affiliateproduct or /recommends/affiliateproduct.

Select the Update button to finish. Your short, branded affiliate link is now successfully created. See the image given below.

In the above example, our affiliate link was

https://xyzcreditcard.com/r.cfm?b=1287949&u=2513771&m=72678&urllink=&afftrack=

And we have cloaked the above link into a short, clean and memorable link using your own domain name. See the cloaked link below.

https://technicalwall.com/recommends/xyzcreditcard

Now you can share this branded URL anywhere on your blog, email newsletters, podcasts, Facebook page and others.

By default, all links that are created in Pretty Links are no-follow. This is a very useful feature considering the fact that all affiliate links that you add on your site must have a no-follow attribute.

Tracking is another feature that is enabled automatically. It helps in tracking clicks on your affiliate links.

Pretty Links Review: Advanced Features

Here are some more outstanding features that you get in the Pro version.

1. Advanced redirect types. More redirection types are included in the pro version.
2. Auto create pretty links. This feature allows you to convert all the affiliate products mentioned in your blog articles into affiliate links.
3. Auto-link keywords. If you want to cloak any particular keywords into affiliate links, auto-link keywords can do that with ease.
4. Support & Updates. You get one year of free support and updates.
5. Detailed click reporting. This reporting helps to see the number of clicks on each of your affiliate links together with IP address, timestamp, URI, and anchor text.
6. Link Categories.
7. Link Tags

If you want to try the Pretty Links for free before purchasing the premium version, you can download the free Lite version plugin from the link given below.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/pretty-link/

Why I Recommend Pretty Links?

Reason 1: Best link management plugin for affiliate marketers

As your affiliate marketing blog grows, you’re most likely to use the same affiliate links on multiple pages of your site.

Let’s imagine that the affiliate program that you’re promoting, suddenly changes your affiliate link.

Now you have to find every blog post where the said affiliate link is added and replace them with the new affiliate link.

It will not only take too much time to find and replace the affiliate link but it will also result in loss of affiliate commission.

This is where link management is so important for an affiliate marketer.

With Pretty Links all your affiliate links are created at a single place. If your affiliate link code provided by your merchant changes, you’ll just have to update it ONCE in the Pretty Links Dashboard and all your links in the blog article will work as usual. Super cool isn’t it.

Reason 2: Organize all your links at a single place

Pretty Links is the best link management plugin. Apart from affiliate links, you can also cloak links to your blog post or pages, social links, URL redirects and even QR codes.

The interface of Pretty Links Dashboard is super easy to use. You can add, edit or delete any links with just one click.

You can easily import or export your links from the Dashboard.

Reason 3: Track all the clicks and traffic

To see how your clicks are performing, visit Clicks under Pretty Links. By default, it shows the affiliate link clicks for a one month period.

You can customize the report to see clicks for different periods of time. Whether you want to see all the clicks or only unique clicks can also be enabled under the Customize Report option.

If you want to see the click performance of any particular affiliate product, you can enter the product slug inside the Search Clicks option and it will display all the clicks that particular product has received in the selected time frame.

All the reports under the Clicks option can be easily downloaded in your computers as a .csv file.

How Popular Is Pretty Links?

According to WordPress.org, the Pretty Links has been downloaded and is active on more than 300000 websites.

It has an incredible 800 plus 5-star rating out of a total of 873 ratings.

See below some of the outstanding reviews it has got in the WordPress.org repository.

How Much Pretty Links Cost?

Pretty Links has the following paid plans:

Beginner Plan: It costs $129 per month. The premium plugin can be installed on one single website.

Marketer Plan: It costs $149 per month and the plugin can be installed on two websites. 

Super Affiliate Plan: It costs $199 per month. It supports up to 5 websites.

Features common to all the three plans are:

• Advanced redirect types
• Auto-create pretty links
• Auto-link keywords
• 1 year of support and updates
• 14-days money-back guarantee

Money-back guarantee: All the premium plans are covered by a 14-days money-back guarantee. If you’re not satisfied with the Pretty Links you can ask for a refund within the 14-days of your purchase.

Pretty Links Alternatives

Pretty Links, no doubt, is one of the best link management plugins around. But it is not the only tool available at your disposal. Some other alternatives of Pretty Links are:

• Thirsty Affiliates
• Bitly
• TinyURL

However, Pretty Links, with 300000 plus downloads and 800 plus 5-star ratings clearly makes it one of the best.

The advanced features that come with the paid plans of Pretty Links makes it a value for money product. It allows you to share affiliate links easily on platforms like blogs, podcasts, videos, and email content along with advanced features already covered above.

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you would find Pretty Links pretty useful.

My Verdict: Is Pretty Links Worth It?

As an affiliate marketer you would find that when your blog grows big it becomes very more difficult to manage your affiliate links manually. 

The Pretty Links plugin makes this job easier by organizing all the links at a single place. 

If you ever have to change your affiliate link, you don’t have to visit all the pages where links have been inserted to make the change.

All you have to do is open the Pretty Links Dashboard and replace the old affiliate link with the new one.

To cloak and manage all my affiliate links on my website, I use Pretty Links. It is a very powerful plugin that has allowed me to generate more affiliate revenue from my content. Plus, it has  also helped me save lots of time and money.

That is why I choose to use Pretty Links.

Thanks for reading my Petty Links review. I hope you found it useful.