BetterLinks Review: WordPress Link Shortening & Tracking

What Is BetterLinks and Why Would You Use It?

BetterLinks is a link shortening and management plugin for WordPress from the team at WP Developer. It sits right in your WordPress admin sidebar and gives you a central place to create, organize, and track shortened URLs.

The core problem it solves is simple: affiliate links are ugly. When you sign up for a program like AppSumo's affiliate network, you get a long URL with random subdomains and tracking parameters that looks like a phishing attempt to most people. BetterLinks lets you turn that into something clean like yourdomain.com/appsumo, which is far more trustworthy and shareable.

But it's not just for affiliate marketers. If you regularly share YouTube links, Zoom meeting URLs, calendar booking pages, or any long URL you're constantly copying and pasting, BetterLinks gives you a memorable shortcut hosted on your own domain. You type the URL from memory instead of digging through tabs to find and copy it.

Managing and Organizing Your Links

The Manage Links area is where you'll spend most of your time. Each link gets a title, an optional description for your own reference, a target URL (the long ugly one), and a short URL (the clean one you'll actually share). You can organize links into categories like "Affiliate Links" or "YouTube Videos" to keep things tidy.

There's also a tagging system, though in this early version (1.1), tags don't actually do much. They don't appear in analytics or drive any automation, so they're more of a placeholder for future functionality. Categories, on the other hand, are genuinely useful for keeping a growing link library manageable.

Once a link is created, you can click to copy it directly from the management screen. The workflow is straightforward: paste your long URL, choose a memorable slug, pick a category, and you're done. No extra configuration required for basic use.

Redirect Types and Link Options

Every shortened link is technically a redirect, and BetterLinks gives you control over what kind. There are three options: 307 (temporary, browser-level), 302 (temporary, server-level), and 301 (permanent). For most affiliate and sharing links, you'll want a 307 since you're not permanently moving content. Use 301 redirects when you're genuinely moving a page, like updating a "Best Deals of 2020" post to a 2021 version and sending all old traffic to the new URL.

BetterLinks also integrates directly into the Gutenberg editor with an "Instant Redirect" feature. If you're working on a page and decide it needs to redirect somewhere else, you can set that up without leaving the editor. It's a nice touch for content-heavy workflows.

Link options cover the SEO side of things. You can toggle nofollow (which you'll generally want on for affiliate links so you're not passing link juice), mark links as sponsored (tells search engines money is involved), and enable parameter forwarding to pass form data or other URL parameters through the redirect. The tracking toggle is also here, and it needs to be enabled if you want click analytics.

Dynamic Redirects: Split Testing, Geo-Targeting, and More

Dynamic redirects are where BetterLinks gets genuinely interesting for marketers. Instead of a link always going to the same destination, you can route traffic based on different conditions.

The rotation option lets you split traffic between two or more URLs at whatever percentage you choose — 50/50, 35/65, or any combination. This is essentially A/B testing built into your link manager. You can set a goal link to track conversions, though the implementation is still basic. There's no automatic winner selection or test completion, which is something that would make this feature significantly more useful.

Geography-based redirects let you send visitors from different countries to different URLs. If you sell products in multiple regions with separate storefronts, one link can route everyone to the right place automatically. Device-based redirects work similarly — send iOS users to the App Store and Android users to Google Play with a single shared URL.

Time-based redirects are particularly clever for promotional campaigns. You can schedule URL destinations in advance: a birthday sale link runs through the weekend, then automatically switches to your Halloween promotion on Monday. No manual intervention needed, and traffic that arrives late doesn't hit a dead end.

UTM Parameters and Social Sharing

BetterLinks includes a built-in UTM builder so you can add campaign tracking parameters without leaving WordPress. You define your source, medium, campaign name, and other UTM fields, then save them as reusable templates. If you're running a Black Friday promotion across Facebook, you create one template and apply it to every relevant link in seconds.

The UTM parameters flow straight through to Google Analytics, giving you clear attribution data on where your clicks are coming from. It's not groundbreaking — Google has a free UTM builder — but having it integrated into your link management workflow saves the tab-switching and copy-pasting.

The social sharing feature takes a different approach. Instead of redirecting someone to a destination page, it redirects them to a social network's share dialog pre-populated with your content. You pick a platform like Twitter, add share text and hashtags, and generate the URL. When someone clicks it, they land on Twitter with a ready-to-post tweet including your link and open graph image. It's a smart way to create one-click share buttons you can distribute to partners or fans who want to help promote your content.

Settings, Analytics, and Admin Controls

The settings area lets you configure defaults for redirect types, link attributes, and a few power-user features. Wildcard redirects can move an entire directory of URLs at once, which is handy during site restructures. A bot-click filter tries to strip automated traffic from your analytics so you're only seeing real human interactions.

You can disable the Gutenberg instant redirect integration if your SEO plugin already handles redirects, and there's an option to enforce HTTPS on all links — though some affiliate programs still use HTTP, so you might want to leave that off and handle it case by case.

The analytics dashboard shows browser type, IP address, timestamp, shortened URL, referring platform, and destination for every click. Even without UTM parameters, BetterLinks detected that clicks were coming from Facebook just from the referrer data. You can filter by specific link names and date ranges. The tools section includes import and export options, with support for migrating from Pretty Links and Simple 301 Redirects. Role management lets you control which WordPress user roles can view, create, edit, or delete links — useful for agencies where you don't want editors swapping in their own affiliate codes.

What's Missing and Final Verdict

BetterLinks has a solid foundation, but at version 1.1, there are some notable gaps. The biggest missing feature is auto-insertion of affiliate links — the ability to automatically hyperlink a keyword like "AppSumo" across all your blog posts without manually creating each link. This is a staple in competing plugins and a genuine dealbreaker for heavy bloggers.

The analytics are functional but sparse. Tags exist but don't connect to anything meaningful yet. A/B testing lacks automatic winner selection. And import support doesn't yet cover ThirstyAffiliates, though the developers have confirmed it's coming. These are early-version shortcomings rather than fundamental design problems, and given WP Developer's track record with their other plugins, they'll likely get addressed.

The strongest case for BetterLinks might actually be the WP Developer agency bundle. It includes NotificationX, ReviewX, SchedulePress, BetterDocs, Essential Add-Ons for Elementor, and BetterLinks — all with lifetime licenses. If you're running client sites on WordPress, that bundle eliminates several annual subscriptions at once. BetterLinks on its own isn't quite ready to replace established alternatives, but it's worth watching closely and locking in a lifetime deal while the price is low.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.