Manage Links in WordPress Easier

Managing WordPress links is not easy at all, learn how to manage links in WordPress easier using the Pretty link plugin to help your visitors

By Claudio Pires
Updated on August 3, 2024
Manage Links in WordPress Easier

If you’ve been using a WordPress website for some time, chances are you have many external and internal links on your site. And it’s okay. These links help your visitors find relevant posts and help search engines crawl your site accordingly. However, the issue is that sometimes, these links lead visitors or bots to the error pages. And managing those links is not easy at all. In this article, you’ll learn how to manage links in WordPress easier using the Pretty link plugin.

But, the good thing is, like everything. You can manage your internal and external links using great tools to make it faster. Let’s explore it now.

Understanding the Importance of Link Management

Before diving into the tools and techniques, let’s understand why link management is essential.

  • SEO Benefits: Proper link management can significantly impact your SEO. Internal links help search engines understand your site’s structure and distribute link equity, which can improve your rankings.
  • User Experience: Well-managed links ensure visitors can easily navigate your site, find related content, and stay engaged. Broken links or poor navigation can frustrate users and increase bounce rates.
  • Content Organization: Keeping your links organized helps maintain a logical structure as your site grows. This makes it easier to update content and ensures all links point to relevant, active pages.

Pretty Links is a handy WordPress plugin capable of link masking, tracking, and redirection. You can easily shrink external links under your domain and make them look prettier with this plugin. For example, if you have a long affiliate URL, you can look like www.domain.com/a/affiliates or anything you want. As a result, a great way to manage links in WordPress is easier using the Pretty link plugin.

This shrinking of affiliate links also helps increase affiliate sales. You can also select the link redirection type, 301 (Permanent Redirect) or 307 (Temporary). Another benefit of your pretty link is that you can track the number of hits by each link. In addition to the Link nofollow attribute, link grouping, and parameter forwarding can also be enabled easily for each type of link. The Pretty Link Pro version is also available with several more amazing features using the Pretty link free plugin.

WP External links are the best Free Links management plugins for WordPress plugin, allowing you to control your blog’s external links fully. This is the best WordPress plugin to add rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links in WordPress blogs.

You can also set a custom link title and icon for all external links. To open all external links in a new window or tab, you must add target=”_blank” to them. With the help of this plugin, you may also add target=”_new” or target =”_top” to all your outbound links. So, this plugin is a great way to manage links in WordPress more easily.

The styling of external links is easy with this plugin. Just write the name of the custom class you want to set for all outbound links and define your CSS styling for that class.  If you want to pass link juice to some of the links or contributors, you can white-list those specific links just by putting their URLs in this plugin’s settings panel.

This plugin allows you to choose custom permalinks for all WordPress pages, including Posts, Pages, categories, Tags, etc. Normally WordPress users can select a custom permalink structure from the settings panel applicable for all Posts, categories, and tags.

But if you want to choose different slugs/URLs for each post, tag, and category, this plugin can do this job. Just install the custom permalinks plugin and activate it. Now you will choose the custom URL structure of each WordPress page, post, tag, category, etc., differently. An example of custom permalinks for WordPress is given below:

The Links Manager was provided by default in WordPress in earlier versions. However, it disappeared with version 3.5; since this release, you couldn’t find the Links Manager on a brand new WordPress installation. Moreover, if you used an earlier version than 3.5 and upgraded your installation. Then the Links Manager was removed unless you used it.

Suppose you used an earlier version of WordPress than 3.5 and had links before the upgrade. You should have the Link Manager. If you haven’t, you can find it by downloading the Links Manager plugin, which is the official way to retrieve the old tool. You can install it to manage your WordPress links just as you would install any other plugin, or install it as a mu-plugin if you think it should be a part of WordPress.

Note that the plugin is concise. It is a one-line plugin that only adds a filter to activate the Links Manager. That means you can activate the Links Manager yourself by adding the following line in the functions.php file of your theme.

add_filter('pre_option_link_manager_enabled', '__return_true');

This also means that if you develop themes for other users and want to use the Links Manager, you can activate them in these themes with this line. That way, users won’t have to download a plugin to use your theme correctly.

Whether present by default in your WordPress installation, with the plugin or the filter, the Links Manager appears in the administration panel’s sidebar, with its own section: “Links. “

Claudio Pires

Claudio Pires is the co-founder of Visualmodo, a renowned company in web development and design. With over 15 years of experience, Claudio has honed his skills in content creation, web development support, and senior web designer. A trilingual expert fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, he brings a global perspective to his work. Beyond his professional endeavors, Claudio is an active YouTuber, sharing his insights and expertise with a broader audience. Based in Brazil, Claudio continues to push the boundaries of web design and digital content, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.