Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.
If you run a site that uses WordPress and your site uses affiliate links to bring in additional profits then this is the plugin in for you.
If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about when I refer to affiliate links or program, I will explain. Affiliate programs use personalized links that lets the programs track links clicked on your site that may lead to a sale. Then these programs pay the site owner for a referral sale.
These personal links are generally long strings of code attached to the product page and are considered “ugly links” that Internet users may see the ugly links and think the links are sending them to spam sites.
Since most bloggers have legitimate links to great product pages and do not want to loose a sale because of an ugly link, they need to use cloaking and redirection plugins to clean up those links.
What is Pretty Link Pro
To clean up those ugly links, you need a plugin like Pretty Link Pro. Pretty Link Pro is designed to shrink, cloak, track, organize, share, and test all of your links on your own domain and server.
In addition to cloaking and redirection, it will even automatically analyze all of the content on your website and replace the keywords with links. You can tell Pretty Link what keywords can be replaced with links per post and how many of those keywords should be replaced within the article.
Along with automation, Pretty Link can auto rotate links, split testing, link importing, and exporting.
These are just a few of my favorite features on Pretty Link Pro, to see the rest make sure to check out the feature page.
My Thoughts on Pretty Link Pro
First off, I hate the term link cloaking. But it’s the technical term for this action. Cloaking a link isn’t always a bad thing and for the most part people cloak links for good reasons. Its just a small number of people who do it for the wrong reasons that gives the every day person caution when you hear the term link cloaking. Evolutionary Designs has a mixture of cloaked and ugly links across the site and we currently use Pretty Link Lite to cloak our links. All of our cloaked links go to affiliate product pages and few other pages that we recommend, use, and support for tracking reasons.
I’ve been using Pretty Link Lite for several years. When I first started the light version was very limited and still very limited. But it did what I needed, But now that Evolutionary Designs is growing and its list of plugins and affiliate programs are growing, the site needs to trim back on some of code weight.
As a web designer and website administrator, I have to weigh function, design, and usability on one scale. All of these factors and more effect how well a site operates.
To help with site operations, I try and limit the amount of plugins needed on a site. By limited the amount of plugins on a site, I try and find plugins that do a few things really good and not one plugin that does one thing.
By using Pretty Link Pro, I can eliminate several plugins and not have to add another plugin that meets the need of feature that I need to help operate the website.
As for my thoughts on the plugin, I think this is a great plugin and will be a benefit anyone who needs to remove their ugly links or wants to track certain links across their site. The price is better than most of their competitors and have more features than they do.
At some point, I will get my hands on a copy of Pretty Link Pro for Evolutionary Designs and do a complete review.
You can get your copy of Pretty Link Pro starting at $37 for a single use license with lifetime updates and support.
Leave a Reply