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ThirstyAffiliates – Affiliate Links, Link Branding, Link Tracking & Marketing Plugin icon
Actively maintained Tested with WP 7.1 #918 most installed plugin #2 in affiliate links Freemium

ThirstyAffiliates – Affiliate Links, Link Branding, Link Tracking & Marketing Plugin

🔗 Affiliate link management & cloaker tool. Easily manage, shrink and track your affiliate links in WordPress. 🔥

Active installs30K+10K+ tier
Downloads · 30d3.3K▼ -16.2% vs prev. 30d
Rating4.6/5251 reviews
Health score89/100Excellent
All-time downloads1.4MSince Jul 2013
Support resolved1 / 1100% in last 2 months
RequiresWP 6.0PHP 7.4+
Overall rank#918of 69,506 plugins
Our verdict

Safe pick

Yes — ThirstyAffiliates is a safe, well-maintained plugin to use in 2026. It runs on 30K+ sites, is rated 4.6/5 and was last updated 1 month ago, and scores 89/100 on our health check.

  • Proven at scale on 30K+ active sites
  • Loved by users — 4.6/5 from 251 reviews
  • Tested with the latest WordPress (7.1)

How does it stack up?

Side-by-side on installs, updates, ratings & support

Daily downloads

178356534Jun 28Aug 11Sep 25
Yesterday148
Daily average (1y)325
Peak day9,856Nov 19, 2025
Last 12 months118.4K

Download spikes usually follow a new release — each site that auto-updates counts as a download.

Rankings

Where ThirstyAffiliates stands today

WordPress.org search rankings

Live position in the plugin search, top 100
KeywordPositionCompeting pluginsCategory
affiliate links #4 1,367 Best affiliate links plugins →
Amazon affiliates #2 299 Best Amazon affiliates plugins →
link shortner #1 12 Best link shortner plugins →
link tracking #3 5,797 Best link tracking plugins →
redirects #67 6,790 Best redirects plugins →

Version adoption

Share of active sites per release.

  • 3.1253.0%
  • 3.1138.2%
  • 3.107.4%
  • Other1.4%

Rating breakdown

★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 from 251 reviews

  • 5★86.5%
  • 4★4.8%
  • 3★0.80%
  • 2★0.80%
  • 1★7.2%

About ThirstyAffiliates

From the official readme · v3.12.0

Description

🔗 Affiliate link management & cloaker tool. Easily manage, shrink and track your affiliate links in WordPress. 🔥

VISIT OUR WEBSITE 🖥️

Click here: ThirstyAffiliates
Check out the PRO Version!

THIRSTYAFFILIATES 💥

ThirstyAffiliates gives bloggers the tools they need to monetize their WordPress website with affiliate marketing.

We’ve made managing your affiliate links as simple as it should be:

  1. Install & activate the ThirstyAffiliates plugin
  2. Go to Affiliate Links -> Add New
  3. Enter the destination URL (your affiliate link) and a title
  4. The plugin creates a new shortlink/link redirect to your long ugly affiliate link by making a pretty link with your own website URL
  5. You can then use the new “TA” button in your editor to add your affiliate link to your content easily

eg. http://example.com/recommends/some-product

Features ✔️

💡 SIMPLE
No complex setups. It’s just another post type in your admin and another button on your Visual editor.

When you are writing blog posts, you can highlight a word and click the “TA” button. This works just like the built-in link tool, you can search for the affiliate link you created earlier by name.

You can even use the Quick Add button to add affiliate links to ThirstyAffiliates on the fly while you are writing.

🔗 BUILT-IN AFFILIATE LINK SHORTNER/LINK CLOAKER
Create pretty links from the affiliate links you’ve placed on the site. ThirstyAffiliates will use a /recommends/ prefix by default for your pretty links, but this can be easily changed to match your preferences.

**💰 SEAMLESS STRIPE SALES***
Create a branded, one-click path to payment with NEW ThirstyPay™ Links. Share your link and start selling anywhere – instantly.

⚙️ BETTER LINK MANAGEMENT
You can group your affiliate links into hierarchical categories. eg. placing all Amazon links within an “Amazon” category, or all software links in a “Software” category.

Managing your links in ThirstyAffiliates means there is only one place to change the destination URL if required rather than having to go back and replace the link in potentially hundreds of articles.

🔃 SAFE REDIRECTS & SMART UNCLOAKING
You can choose from 301 (default), 302, or 307 redirects, all of which are safe link redirects.

Link redirects protect your affiliate links from being scraped and replaced by malware in your visitor’s browser.

There is also a smart uncloaking feature so if the affiliate program you are using (such as Amazon Associates) does not like your links behind a redirect, you can still use ThirstyAffiliates. Your links can be conditionally uncloaked on the front end.

🛡️ NO LINK CLASHES OR DATABASE BLOAT
Uses proper custom post types to avoid link clashes that can occur with other solutions.

Keeps its database footprint small to ensure you don’t over bloat your database with useless information.

🖼️ ADD IMAGES TO AFFILIATE LINKS
You can even add images and banners to your affiliate links and recall them for easy insertion when writing your content.

Simply click the new “TA” affiliate link button on your editor, click the cog to open the Advanced Link Picker, and search & choose the image you want to insert and it will be inserted pre-wrapped in your affiliate link.

📊 CLICK STATISTICS & REPORTS
Adds click tracking to your links to track every click.

Comes with built-in reports so you can explore, over time, how much your affiliate links have been clicked and what is popular on your site.

… and so much more! Visit our site to learn more about what ThirstyAffiliates can do for you.

* Pro users benefit from no added payment processing fees, while a small 3% fee is added per-transaction for free users.

THIRSTYAFFILIATES PRO 💪

We have a PRO add-on for ThirstyAffiliates that bolts on extra functionality that might be interesting to advanced affiliate marketers and bloggers looking to automate parts of their affiliate marketing.

Some of our popular PRO features include:

  • Product Displays (NEW)
    Create beautifully styled and responsive displays for your affiliate links to drive more clicks and interest with ease.

  • Automatic Keyword Linking
    Boost your affiliate income by automatically linking affiliate links to keywords throughout your site, great for monetizing your back catalog of content!

  • Advanced Statistics Reports
    Amazing advanced reports such as performance by category, performance over 24/hr periods (to identify peak click times), Geolocation reports (where people click from), and more!

  • Geolocations
    Geo-target your visitors based on their country of origin and redirect them to geographically appropriate affiliate URLs

  • Google Click Events
    Pushes a click event to your Google Analytics on click

  • CSV Import/Export
    Import and export affiliate links via CSV. Great for managing links across multiple sites

  • Amazon API Importing
    Search and import affiliate links from Amazon’s Product Advertising API

  • High-speed HTAccess redirect
    Loads affiliate link redirects into your htaccess file for faster redirecting, meaning WordPress & even PHP isn’t loaded

  • Link Event Notification Emails
    Get notified about significant events with your affiliate links like when they reach a certain amount of clicks total or a certain amount of clicks in a period of time

  • Automatic Link Health Checker
    Automatically explores your affiliate links for 404’s or broken links and will notify you when it detects problems

Check out all the ThirstyAffiliates PRO features here

INTEGRATIONS ⚡

  • Google Analytics – ThirstyAffiliates has a tight integration with Google Analytics to easily push click events when an affiliate link is clicked.
  • Amazon – Integrates with Amazon’s Product Advertising API to allow you to search and import affiliate links within Amazon.

What’s Next 🤩

Enjoying your time with ThirstyAffiliates? Consider checking out some of our other projects:

  • MemberPress – Full-featured Membership solution for WordPress. Control who has access to your site and sell content securely through payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.net
  • EasyAffiliate – Complete Affiliate Program management plugin for WordPress. Start an Affiliate Program to dramatically increase traffic, attention, and sales.
  • Pretty Links – Advanced link cloaking and redirection plugin for WordPress used to shrink, track, cloak, and share links.
  • Buy Now Plus – Easily start accepting Credit Card payments through a simple buy now button on your website or social media accounts using the Stripe gateway.
  • Members – Roles and capabilities management plugin for your WordPress site. This is an excellent plugin to use alongside a Membership solution such as MemberPress.

Installation

  1. Upload the thirstyaffiliates/ folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  2. Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” menu in WordPress
  3. Visit the new “ThirstyAffiliates” menu and click ‘Add New’ to add an affiliate link.
  4. Use the new “TA” button on the Visual editor to link up an affiliate link when writing content.
  5. Visit http://thirstyaffiliates.com/ for more information, info about the PRO version and support.

Frequently asked questions

Who should use ThirstyAffiliates?

ThirstyAffiliates is aimed at bloggers using WordPress, but really all affiliate marketers of any kind who use WordPress as their CMS can use ThirstyAffiliates to aid in their affiliate marketing monetization.

Help, my links aren’t redirecting! It just brings up a 404 error.

This is a common issue usually caused by another plugin or theme not flushing redirect rules correctly after setting up another custom post type. To resolve the problem follow these steps: Deactivate ThirstyAffiliates, don’t worry your links are safely stored in the database. Reactivate ThirstyAffiliates Visit the Settings->Permalinks page and click save. Go back to ThirstyAffiliates->All Affiliate Links and view one of the links, it should be redirecting properly.

Are there any known conflicts?

WordPress supports a very vibrant ecosystem of themes and plugins so from time to time it’s expected that there will be some minor conflicts with other products. See our Knowledge Base for an up to date list of known conflicts.

Is ThirstyAffiliates translatable?

Absolutely! ThirstyAffiliates is ready for translation and we also include a number of common languages in our plugin as contributed by our lovely users.

Do I need to have coding skills to use ThirstyAffiliates?

Definitely not. We have built ThirstyAffiliates to be 100% within the dashboard of your site. Some knowledge of how redirects work might be beneficial, but overall it is a very simple plugin to configure and use.

Can I use ThirstyAffiliates to run an affiliate program for my store?

No – ThirstyAffiliates is not for running an affiliate program. ThirstyAffiliates is for affiliates to manage their affiliate marketing efforts from all the programs they belong to. If you need to run an affiliate program on your store we recommend you check out Easy Affiliate.

Changelog

There is a new version of ThirstyAffiliates available.

3.12.0

  • Cleaned up plugin design and pro messaging
  • Added setting to disable ThirstyPay
  • Tweaked design of Reports page
  • Change the order of menu items putting more used items close to the top

3.11.10

  • Minor security fix

3.11.9

  • Security hardening in Shortcode

3.11.8

  • Fix regression against old versions of the Pro plugin

3.11.7

  • Fix in plugin messaging bug

3.11.6

  • Updated Growth Tools
  • Properly handle media file deletion
  • Extended data not importing for new links
  • Search columns include Slug and Destination URL
  • Add slug column to Links listing table

Full changelog on WordPress.org →

Screenshots

Adding an Affiliate Link
Adding an Affiliate Link
Affiliate Link Listing
Affiliate Link Listing
Settings Page
Settings Page
Category Page
Category Page
Reports Page
Reports Page

For developers

Is this your plugin? Show off the numbers.

Add a live badge to your site, docs or GitHub README. It updates on its own — no account needed.

Active installs badge Rating badge Health score badge

Best ThirstyAffiliates alternatives

All affiliate links plugins →
Alternatives
Rank Plugin Active installs Rating Updated Health
1 PrettyLinks – Affiliate Link Management, URL Shortener, Link Cloaking, Tracking & Branded Short Links PrettyLinks 🌠 Shorten, brand, and track any URL on your own domain. Keep your links — and your data —… by Blair Williams 200K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 (1.3K) 1 month ago 86
3 BetterLinks – Link Shortener, Link Cloaking, Redirects, Affiliate Link Manager & MCP BetterLinks Shorten, cloak, redirect & track every link in WordPress. Branded short URLs, click… by WPDeveloper 20K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 (85) 4 days ago 93
4 URL Shortify – Simple and Easy URL Shortener URL Shortify – Simple and Easy URL Shortener URL Shortify helps you beautify, manage, share & cloak any links on or off your WordPress… by KaizenCoders 10K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 (167) 3 weeks ago 93
5 Content Egg – Affiliate Product Importer & Price Comparison Content Egg – Affiliate Product Importer & Price Comparison Import affiliate products, compare prices, and publish product reviews with 25+ editorial… by keywordrush 10K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 3.9 (56) 3 days ago 89
6 AffiliateX – Amazon Affiliate Plugin, Product Boxes, Comparison Tables & Affiliate Link Tracking AffiliateX AffiliateX is the best WordPress Amazon Affiliate Plugin. Create professional affiliate… by WPCenter 9K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 (34) 6 days ago 87
7 Lasso Lite (Simple URLs) Lasso Lite (Simple URLs) Free Lasso Lite (Simple URLs): cloak affiliate links, add product displays in WordPress… by Andrew Fiebert 4K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 3 (46) 3 days ago 79
8 Cloak Affiliate Links for WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links for WooCommerce Cloak your WooCommerce external & affiliate links. by datafeedr 1K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 (12) 1 year ago 39
9 linkPizza-Manager linkPizza-Manager Integrates LinkPizza with WordPress for affiliate link management and performance tracking. by Arjan Pronk 700+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 3 (2) 4 months ago 56
10 Affiliate Link Tracker Affiliate Link Tracker Advanced affiliate link tracker for tracking where your affiliate conversions come from. by SEOSEON EUROPE S.L 500+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 5 (3) 6 years ago 34
11 LinkCentral – URL shortener, Affiliate Links & Custom Link Shortener with Link Tracking LinkCentral The easiest URL shortener, short links manager, and link tracking plugin. Fast and… by Design for WP 500+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 5 (19) 4 weeks ago 86

FAQ

ThirstyAffiliates: quick answers

Straight answers, pulled from live WordPress.org data.

Live data from WordPress.org · checked Sep 26, 2026

Is ThirstyAffiliates free?

Yes. ThirstyAffiliates is free to download and use from the official WordPress.org plugin directory. The developer also sells premium add-ons or a Pro version with extra features.

Is ThirstyAffiliates safe to use in 2026?

Yes — ThirstyAffiliates is a safe, well-maintained plugin to use in 2026. It runs on 30K+ sites, is rated 4.6/5 and was last updated 1 month ago, and scores 89/100 on our health check.

How many websites use ThirstyAffiliates?

ThirstyAffiliates is active on 30K+ WordPress websites and has been downloaded 1,376,266 times since it launched in July 2013. It was downloaded 3,296 times in the last 30 days.

Does ThirstyAffiliates work with WordPress 7.1?

Yes. The developer has tested ThirstyAffiliates up to WordPress 7.1.2, the latest release. It requires WordPress 6.0 or newer.

What PHP version does ThirstyAffiliates need?

ThirstyAffiliates requires PHP 7.4 or higher. Most hosts run PHP 8.x today, so it works on any modern WordPress hosting.

When was ThirstyAffiliates last updated?

The latest version, 3.12.0, was released on August 25, 2026 (1 month ago).

Who makes ThirstyAffiliates?

ThirstyAffiliates is developed and maintained by Blair Williams.

What are the best alternatives to ThirstyAffiliates?

The most popular alternatives to ThirstyAffiliates are PrettyLinks (200K+ installs), BetterLinks (20K+ installs) and URL Shortify (10K+ installs).

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