BetterLinks Review – A Worthy Pretty Links & Thirsty Links Alternative?

BetterLinks is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily create shortened links with custom titles, branded links, and affiliate links with query string parameters. If you want to make long affiliate links look great and quickly deploy short URLs for your social networks or marketing, install the plugin on WordPress and you're ready to go.

Great for affiliate link cloaking, affiliate link tracking, and shortening ugly URLs.

BetterLinks is a self-hosted link-cloaking solution for WordPress. The BetterLinks Link Cloaking feature can help you create shorter, cloaked links from longer URLs with ease.

The plugin is easy to use – with a few clicks you can create a short URL for each of your links – but there's so much more to this plugin and it's A competitor to Pretty Links and Thirsty Affiliates, two of the most popular URL cloaker, URL shortener, and affiliate link management tools.

General Use Cases

BetterLinks is great for managing affiliate links, shortening long URLs on your own website or external pages, and tracking everything in one place. The plugin's advanced features can help you analyze the performance of specific URLs, create affiliate link cloaking opportunities, and build a comprehensive link management solution. It's easy to get started with BetterLinks, but read on if you want a more detailed breakdown of BetterLink's features.

Pros

  • Easy to use – In this category of URL management tools, BetterLinks is by far the easiest plugin to use. It uses a modern design and a faster way of saving links, so you can work with it faster.
  • Grid and list view for better link management. Grid is great for sorting and categorizing links. List view is better for editing. There's also a dark mode.
  • You can migrate all links from Pretty Links or Thirsty Affiliates with a few clicks.
  • Clean design – There's no clutter and everything is nicely presented in one screen. You can also change the view if you prefer a different way to view your links.
  • Great analytics reporting – while similar plugins currently have more reporting features, BetterLinks has a better presentation and the development team is working to improve this feature. I expect good things.
  • Fast performance – Modern design with JSON database.
  • Good support – the support team responds very quickly, even for the free version of the plugin. This wasn't my experience with the premium support of most other tools.

Cons

  • Prone to bugs – It's a new product, so bugs are to be expected. If you have a large website with thousands of links, I recommend testing the tool on a staging server before deploying it on the live website.
  • Security Issues – Since this is a relatively new and unproven plugin, there's always the potential for security vulnerabilities. And in fact, WordFence, the security firewall plugin for WordPress, has found severe vulnerabilities in the plugin's simple 301 redirects feature.
  • No option to automatically create a prefix for shortened URLs.

Pro version vs. Free version

The free version of BetterLinks offers a lot of features but here's what you get on the paid plans.

IndividualBusinessAgency (Lifetime)
$49$149$299 
Everything in Free plus:Everything in Individual plus:Everything in Business plus:
Use on Single SiteUse on Unlimited SitesLifetime Update & Support
Advanced Redirect Types
Individual Analytics
Link cloaking
Link Expiration
User Role Management
Google Analytics Integration
10% Credit Reward
25% Renewal Discount
1 Year Update & Support
UTM Builder 
Dynamic Links
Split Testing
Import and Export links
Social Share for UTM Builder
Force HTTPS

BetterLinks Vs Prettylinks Vs ThirstyAffiliates

This table is to explain the differences between the three products.

BetterLinks ProPretty Links ProThirsty Affiliates pro
Pricing (one site)$49$79$49
Shortening / Destination Cloakingyesyesyes
Custom Post Types yesno
Link Categorizationyesyesyes
Link Prefixesnoyesno
Statistics and Analyticsyesyesyes
Detailed Click Reportingnoyes yes
Conversion Reportsyesyes  yes
Support1 year1 year 1 year
Refund guarantee no14 days14 days
Automatic Keyword Linking no yesyes
Geolocation and Geographic Redirectsyesyesyes
No Follow & Open In New Tab Options yesyesyes
Link Scheduling yesyesyes
URL Shortening (with bit.ly)no noyes
Automatic 404 Checkernonoyes
Insert Links in Gutenberg Editoryesyesno
Link Tagsyesyesyes
Automatic Link Titlesnoyesno
Forward URL Parametersyesyesno
Integration with Google Analyticsyesyesyes
User Role Managementyesnono
Device-based dynamic redirectsyesnono
Tracking Pixel Redirectsnoyesno
Optimized queries to reduce load time & make fasteryesnono
HTTPS Redirectionyesnono
UTM Builder yesyesno
Bot Blocker yesyesyes
Amazon APInonoyes
Auto linkernoyesno
Wildcard Redirectyesyes (if domain provider supports it)no
Split testingyesyesno
Individual Analyticsyesnono
Import Data From A JSON Fileyesnono
Social Share Optionsnoyesno
Drag & Drop interfaceyesnono
Dark Modeyesnono
Renewal discountsyesnono
QR Codesnoyes no

Established link shortening and tracking tool companies have a longer history of improving their plugins and weeding out bugs. Pretty Links and Thirsty Links have now merged, so there's a large pool of knowledge there. Of course, this means that the most well-known plugins on the market have a sort of monopoly and there's always a temptation to sit back and rest while newcomers struggle to get to market.

betterlinks link management screen

My main criticism of Pretty Links has always been the speed at which a link click is processed. I've heard many complaints that the server takes too long to convert a short link into a full affiliate link or a longer link. I run my websites on private Cloud Servers (Cloudways, recommended by the way) and these servers are very fast.

BetterLinks has come up with a solution. Instead of using the WordPress database to process the links, a JSON file (effectively a single code file) takes care of everything. This speeds up the process considerably. That means less load on the server and a faster WordPress website for visitors. And that ultimately means more money for you.

Pretty Links Latency

pretty links redirect latency
prettylinks latency miliseconds https

Better Links latency

better links redirect latency
better links redirect latency with https

What's Missing?

The software is still under development and the excellent team at WP Developers is constantly improving it. So it's only a matter of time before some of these features are added to the plugin's code.

There's no option to automatically create a prefix for shortened URLs. If you prefer to use a prefix like /go/ or /recommended/ or /get/ before each link, you must manually add this to the URL pattern individually.

Granted, this isn't a huge problem, but it leaves open the possibility of forgetting to add it. Many website owners and administrators like to use these types of prefixes for two reasons

  1. to exclude all links below the URL section (e.g. /go/) from Google's index. This saves you from having to do this for every link
  2. for better tracking of link clicks in Google Analytics and other analytics platforms.

Should you buy it?

BetterLinks is an all-in-one solution for managing your affiliate links. It's a simple plugin that anyone can use to create and link to any short link or track all of their affiliate links. While there are other similar plugins, Betterlinks does a pretty good job and could work out more economical.

Not to be outdone, PrettyLinks recently added a new feature called PrettyPay Links, which allows you to sell products and services directly through your links.

And the company has also fired back at competitors by adding its “Product Displays” feature where you can present your affiliate links in a visually appealing manner that is also user-friendly. By designing with aesthetics and usability as top priorities, we hope to attract more clicks from your readers by adding visual interest to relevant content pages.

Thirsty Affiliates has a Proactive Link Fixer, a front-end link fixing script that ensures your affiliate links are always up to date). There's also the Geolocation feature which gives you the ability to offer alternate destinations for international clicks via country targeting. Just some of the features that set it apart from BetterLinks. I recommend you try out each of the three plugins to see which one works best for you.

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