Do you have an affiliate website on WordPress?

Then you need to make sure you use the below plugins on your site, to maximize the conversions you make out of your affiliate promotions.

Being an affiliate marketer since 2014, I’ve tried and tested dozens of affiliate marketing plugins for boosting conversions.

For this blog post, I’ve distilled down and presented you the 7 WordPress affiliate plugins you need to use on your website.

These are the 7 best WordPress affiliate plugins

#1. Affiliate Link Cloaking Plugins

Affiliate links are messy. They contain tracking parameters, and also strings in the URL.

Most of the visitors, verify the links before clicking them.

Affiliates links if they are inserted as they are, appear quite fishy. So, link cloaking greatly improves user experience and affiliate link CTR.

Pretty Links is one of the best plugins I’ve encountered for link cloaking. This plugin gives you the flexibility to cloak, track, organize, shrink, share and test your links. You can do all these things on your own domain.

It is a great plugin that tracks your links and gives a detailed report of link clicks.

It offers great features like:

1. Tracks the number of clicks per link
2. Tracks visitor activity with links using its cookie-based system
3. Turn on/off tracking for each link
4. Create nofollow/noindex links
5. Excluding IP Addresses from Stats
6. You can select temporary (302 or 307) or permanent (301) redirections for your pretty links

One thing I really liked about this plugin is that you can get rid of the /go/ or /recommended/ in the affiliate links, and make them example.com/product/. With this, it increases your affiliate click CTR.

You can also enable Pretty Links to automatically add affiliate links to the keywords you mention in the settings. This feature is called auto-link keywords.

An upgraded version, Pretty Links Pro is available with significant improvements over the lite version. I’m making use of their pro version, and it’s absolutely worth it. It helps you easily track where affiliate clicks happened and also helps you track conversions.

The free version is available in the WordPress repo.

If you are looking for an alternative to PrettyLinks, you can look into ThirstyAffiliates. It also comes with similar features, but you can’t get rid of affiliate slug’s prefix (/go/ or /recommended/)

#2. Table Builder Plugins

To increase the affiliate sales you can make use of free or paid table builder plugins.

WordPress Gutenberg comes with an inbuilt table block to create the tables. But the downside of this is that you cannot insert the image.

So you may have to look at some other plugins.

You can use a free TablePress plugin. But to make your tables responsive you need to go with its premium version “Responsive Tables”.

There is another drag and drop plugin called WP Table Builder.

With this, you can easily create responsive tables like comparison tables, pricing tables, list tables and many more.

Right now it comes with five elements. For all these elements customization options are available.

1. Text
2. Image
3. List
4. Button
5. Star Rating

It comes with flexible options like merging cells and split cells. So far, I have found this plugin to be the best free plugin developed keeping ease of use in mind.

Ninjatables

You can create different types of tables with this plugin. It comes with import-export features.

Even if you create thousands of responsive tables it will not make your site slow.

If you are currently using TablePress Plugin or Ultimate Table Plugin, you can easily import them to Ninja Tables with just a single click. Also, you can export the tables to JSON or CSV format.

With Ninja Tables Pro, you can create tables for your woo-commerce products with built-in cart info and checkout buttons, thus boosting your conversions.

To make your tables attractive there are 100+ table styles available for you to choose. Added to that there is a library of 3 most popular CSSs with unlimited color schema!

Below are some of the most used table styles:

1. Single Line Cells
2. Fixed Layout
3. Hover rows
4. Bordered table
5. Table Inverse
6. Striped rows
7. Compact Table
8. RTL Support
9. Data Tables
10. Foo Tables
11. Stackable Table
12. Bootstrap 3 Table Styles

#3. Notification Bar Plugins

I use Elementor on my site. It comes with a free pop up functionality that itself acts as a notification bar. Notification bars are really useful for boosting your website conversions.

I make use of notification bars for all my money posts.

You can see that for the above comparison post, I have a notification bar displayed at the bottom of the screen with affiliate buttons to the respective products. I also have this kind of notification bars for individual product reviews.

For implementing the above, I’m making use of the Elementor popups feature, ACF plugin, and also a dynamic content feature of Elementor.

Many popular popup plugins like Optinmonster come with notification bars too. Or else, you can make use of any free WordPress plugins like WP Notification Bars.

#4. Popup plugin

Popups are a great way to boost affiliate sales. But before using popups on your website, you need to make sure that the product’s affiliate terms and services allow it. For example, Amazon affiliate's TOS doesn’t allow you to promote their products in any kind of popup.

For popups, I’m again making use of Elementor’s popup feature. You can also use some pop-up plugins like OptinMonster, Thrive Leads, and Poptin (free WP plugin).

When choosing popups plugin for boosting affiliate sales, you need to look into the following features:

1. Exit-intent functionality
2. Slide-ins
3. Scroll triggered popups
4. Click-trigger popups

You can consider offering your visitors a special offer or discount prior to them leaving your blog post.

#5. Content-Aware Sidebars

With this plugin, you can boost conversions by displaying different widgets based on conditions. You can insert the shortcodes and also make them appear or even schedule them to display at specific times.

You are free to create post sidebars, page sidebars, category sidebars, or any custom sidebars.

If you have an Amazon affiliate site, you can consider displaying the post-specific bestseller list in the sidebar. It will increase your conversions by a great extent.

You can also consider making these sidebars sticky, making use of Q2W3 widget and make sure that the sidebar remains on top no matter how many visitors scroll down your page.

You can display or hide the widgets on any of your posts based on these conditions:

• Posts, Pages & Custom Post Types
• Content with Tags, Categories, or Custom Taxonomies
• Content written by selected Authors
• Page Templates
• Blog Page & Post Type Archives
• Author Archives
• Taxonomy Archives
• Date Archives
• Front Page, Search Results, 404 Not Found Page
• Any Combination of Above

#6. Coupons and Deals plugin

If you are presenting coupons and deals in your WordPress site, displaying it in the form of deals and coupons box skyrockets your conversions.

For this, you can make use of a plugin – WP Coupons and Deals.

This plugin allows you to display the coupon boxes and also deal boxes.

It comes with many features like:

1. Text
2. Click to copy
3. Coupon templates
4. Image coupons
5. Expiration countdown
6. Social share buttons
7. Customize everything

It is a freemium plugin. The pro version comes with additional features. You can try out their free version, and I’m sure you get the pro version of the plugin that pays itself off in leaps and bounds.

#7. AAWP

If you’re running Amazon Affiliates websites, you need to make use of this plugin.

For many years, EasyAzon was one of the popular Amazon affiliates plugin. But AAWP changed everything by offering tons of features.

It comes with the main features like:

1. Text
2. Text links
3. Single (or multiple) product boxes
4. Bestseller (lists)
5. New Releases (lists)
6. Data fields
7. Widgets

Some other features include:

• Dynamic text links
• Product boxes in different variations
• Automated lists (Bestseller and New Releases)
• Displaying single product information (e.g. price)
• Filtering and ordering of lists
• Usage of AAWP functions inside your theme
• Geo-targeting in order to handle foreign visitors
• Pre-built templates & styles
• SSL/HTTPS support
• Google AMP support

It also comes with advanced features like shortcodes, widgets & PHP functions.

I really liked their support for PHP templating for custom presentations. You can get a WordPress developer and create custom layouts for your product comparison tables.

AAWP easily integrates with Amazon product advertising API and pulls in up-to-date information like product title, price, and image to your site.

It helps you completely stay compliant with Amazon Affiliates’ terms and services.

AAWP is being actively developed and they release plenty of new features regularly. They also have extensive documentation and FAQs for implementing every feature it has got to offer.

Akshay recommends:
1. 17+ Killer WordPress Gutenberg Plugins (Death of Page Builders?)
2. 32 WordPress Plugins that Boost your Productivity

Wrapping up

These are some of the best affiliate plugins for WordPress. They personally have helped me a lot in boosting affiliate conversions.

There are many more affiliate plugins that I may have missed including in this blog post.

What about you?

What are all the affiliate plugins you recommend?

Let me know in the comments section.