Pretty Links Alternative: What to Use and When to Stay

Pretty Links is a good plugin, and most people searching for an alternative are not unhappy with it. They want something narrower, something with different tracking, or something that does not grow their database the way per-click logging does.

Knowing which of those you are makes the choice obvious. Here is an honest look at what it does well and where the alternatives fit.

What Pretty Links Genuinely Does Well

Credit where it is due, because a fair comparison starts here.

It is a mature, widely used link management tool with a real free version on WordPress.org. It creates branded short links, cloaks affiliate destinations, tracks clicks, and its paid tiers add automation such as keyword replacement, which turns mentions of a term into links across your whole site automatically.

That last feature is the one nobody else quite replicates in the same way, and if you rely on it, most of this article does not apply to you. Stay where you are.

The interface is built for people managing many affiliate links as a daily job, which is exactly who it is for.

That framing is worth holding on to while you read the rest of this. A tool being more than you need is not the same as a tool being bad, and switching away from something that works costs you a migration, a period where links might break, and the time to learn a new interface. The bar for moving should be a specific problem you can name, not a general feeling that something lighter would be tidier.

Reason 1: You Only Wanted Redirects

The most common reason to look elsewhere.

Plenty of sites installed a link management plugin because they wanted three things: short URLs on their own domain, the ability to repoint them later, and a click count per link. That is redirect functionality, and a full link management suite is more surface area than the job needs.

DevDome Redirect Manager covers exactly that scope. Fully free with no rule limit and no paid tier, 301/302/307/308 per rule, click counting per rule, and automatic cache purging across ten common cache plugins so a stale cache never serves a dead destination.

What it does not do is the affiliate-specific work: no keyword auto-linking, no affiliate link library organised by merchant, no product data. If those matter to you, it is the wrong tool and Pretty Links is the better fit.

Reason 2: The Click Log Grew

Tools that record every individual click store a database row per click. On a site with meaningful traffic that table gets large, and it stays in every backup you take from then on.

This is not a flaw so much as a design choice, and it buys you granular data. But if you only ever look at totals, you are paying storage and backup time for detail you never open.

Worth checking before you install anything link-related: does it store per-click rows or aggregates, and does it prune old data on a schedule?

Reason 3: Your Tracking Question Changed

Some sites discover the number they actually want is not per-link clicks but total outbound clicks across the whole site, including links that never went through a redirect at all.

That is an analytics question rather than a link management one. Server-side click capture in DevDome Analytics records outbound clicks as they pass through your own infrastructure, which also means ad blockers cannot strip them the way they strip JavaScript click listeners.

The two approaches answer different things and coexist happily: the redirect tells you how a specific link performed, analytics tells you which pages drove the clicks.

Reason 4: The Amazon Case

If most of your links are Amazon, the constraint that matters is not features but program rules.

Amazon has specific requirements about how its links may be presented, and cloaking is an area where those requirements have consequences. Read the current operating agreement rather than any summary, because the terms change and losing an Associates account is not a recoverable mistake.

For Amazon-heavy sites, the higher-value problems are usually geo-routing international clicks to the right storefront and monitoring for products that have gone unavailable, neither of which is what a link cloaker is for.

Migrating Without Breaking Everything

Your short URLs exist because a plugin is answering requests for them. Deactivate it and they stop resolving, wherever they were published.

So the order matters. Export your existing links first. Recreate the rules in the new tool while the old one is still active. Test a representative sample, including at least one link you know is published somewhere outside your own site. Only then deactivate the old plugin, and keep the export.

Do not skip the export because the plugin still works. The moment you need it is the moment it does not.

The Honest Recommendation

If you use keyword auto-linking or manage a large affiliate library as a daily task, stay with Pretty Links. It is built for that and the alternatives are not.

If you wanted short links you control, redirects you can repoint, and a click count, a redirect plugin is the smaller and simpler answer.

If your real question is how many people click out of your site and from which pages, that is an analytics problem and no link plugin will answer it well, whichever one you pick.