Kitgenix Affiliate Link Manager

Kitgenix Affiliate Link Manager is a self-hosted WordPress affiliate link manager for creating branded short links, controlling redirect destinations, organising campaigns and measuring aggregate click activity without relying on a hosted Kitgenix tracking platform. It is built for affiliate marketers, publishers, content websites, agencies, review sites, WooCommerce stores and other WordPress sites that publish external campaign or partner links. Instead of scattering long destination URLs throughout your content, publish a stable first-party URL such as example.com/go/product-name/ and manage the destination behind it from WordPress. The public short link can remain unchanged even when the affiliate destination changes. Learn more about the developer behind the plugin at Kitgenix. Key Features

• Create branded short URLs on your own WordPress domain.
• Configure the global redirect prefix used before link slugs.
• Change destinations without changing the public short URL.
• See who changed a link destination and when, and restore an earlier address with one click.
• Insert and search saved affiliate links from the block editor without copying slugs manually.
• Enable or disable individual links without deleting them.
• Choose the redirect status used for managed links.
• Add nofollow, sponsored, or nofollow sponsored relationship guidance to link records.
• Schedule when links become active and when they expire, with a fallback URL for other cases.
• Rotate one public link across several destination URLs using sequential or random rotation.
• Organise links with groups and tags; search, filter, sort, duplicate and bulk-manage records.
• Record aggregate click analytics without storing visitor IP addresses.
• Run automatic and manual destination health checks.
• Import and export links using CSV and JSON workflows.
• Manage links programmatically through authenticated REST API routes or WP-CLI.

See the "Other Notes" section below for full details on each feature area.

1. Upload the kitgenix-affiliate-link-manager folder to /wp-content/plugins/, or install the plugin ZIP through Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin.
2. Activate Kitgenix Affiliate Link Manager.
3. Open the Kitgenix Affiliate Link Manager admin screen.
4. Review the redirect prefix and redirect behaviour before publishing links.
5. Create an affiliate link, choose its slug, and enter the destination URL.
6. Add optional scheduling, fallback, rotation, group, tag, and campaign-note settings as required.
7. Test the branded redirect before using it in a live campaign.
8. If destination health checking is enabled, review the health-check interval and timeout for your hosting environment.

After changing a redirect prefix, visit Settings > Permalinks and save if WordPress rewrite rules need to be refreshed on your environment.

Branded Redirects and Stable Short Links Each managed link has a WordPress-controlled slug. The plugin combines that slug with the configured redirect prefix to create the public-facing URL. A prefix such as go and a slug such as hosting-offer produces a route similar to /go/hosting-offer/. When a visitor requests that route, the redirect layer resolves the matching link, checks whether it is enabled and currently active, evaluates any start/expiry rules, chooses the appropriate destination, records the aggregate click event and then issues the configured redirect. The underlying affiliate URL can be changed later while the public URL remains stable. The managed link records are stored in the private kitgenix_aff_link post type. Groups use the kitgenix_aff_group taxonomy and tags use kitgenix_aff_tag, allowing large collections of campaigns to be organised without exposing those records as normal public posts. Block Editor Affiliate Link Picker This is a text-formatting option inside text blocks (Paragraph, Heading, List, and similar) - not a separate block you add from the block inserter's "+" menu, so searching the inserter for "Affiliate link" will not find it. To use it: select some text inside a text block, then open the block toolbar's More rich text controls button - the small overflow/chevron icon next to Bold, Italic and Link - and choose Affiliate link. That opens a searchable list of saved links; pick one and the selected text is linked to its branded short URL, with the link's rel value applied automatically. If no text is selected, the link name is inserted for you. An "Open in new tab" toggle is included, and the same button can change or remove an existing affiliate link. Anyone who can write posts can use the picker. It only shows link names and short URLs, never the underlying affiliate destinations. The button only appears for users who can edit_posts (filterable with kitgenix_affiliate_picker_capability); a user without that capability won't see it at all, with no error shown. Destination Change History Every time a link's destination changes, the plugin records the previous and new address, who made the change, when it happened, and where it came from (admin screen, REST API, WP-CLI, import, duplicate or restore). The original address is recorded when a link is created. Open a link's Edit screen (or use the History row action) to review the changes. You can restore an earlier address with one click if a merchant URL was changed by mistake. Scheduling, Expiry and Fallback Destinations Campaigns frequently have start dates, expiry dates or time-sensitive offers. Each link can store a start timestamp and expiry timestamp so the redirect state is evaluated automatically at request time. A fallback URL can be used when the normal destination should not be used. This is useful for expired promotions, not-yet-active campaigns, retired products or other cases where sending a visitor to an alternative page is better than leaving a dead affiliate link in published content. Because the schedule is evaluated by the redirect resolver, the behaviour is functional rather than a wp-admin label only. Destination Rotation A single branded link can distribute requests across a pool of destinations. The plugin supports no rotation, sequential rotation and random rotation. The primary destination and additional rotation destinations form the available pool used by the redirect logic. Rotation can be useful for publishers testing several offers, balancing traffic between equivalent landing pages, or maintaining one memorable public URL while working with multiple destination URLs. Link Groups, Tags and Bulk Administration Groups and tags provide two layers of organisation. The admin interface also includes search, filtering, sorting and bulk operations, making it practical to manage more than a handful of redirects. Bulk tools include assigning groups and adding tags to selected links. Existing links can be duplicated to create a new campaign from a known configuration, and links can be enabled or disabled independently of deletion. Aggregate Click Analytics The analytics subsystem stores daily aggregate statistics in the plugin-owned {prefix}kitgenix_aff_click_stats database table. It can report total clicks, recent click trends and breakdowns by source, placement and normalised referrer host. The click-statistics implementation is intentionally aggregate. It does not store the visitor's IP address, full browser user-agent, full referring URL, tracking cookie or browser fingerprint as part of the analytics record. Referrer data used for reporting is reduced to the host before storage. The plugin also maintains link-level click totals and cached overview data so the admin interface does not need to reconstruct every summary on every page load. Affiliate Destination Health Checks Managed destinations can become unavailable, start returning errors or redirect somewhere unexpected. The health-check system can inspect configured destinations and retain the resulting status, message, HTTP code, final URL, redirect-hop count and time of the last check. Health checks can run automatically using WordPress scheduled events or can be started manually for a link. The automatic checker processes the catalogue in batches and maintains a cursor/summary so a large link library does not need to be tested in one request. Health checking sends a normal server-side HTTP request to the destination selected by the site administrator. The destination website therefore receives ordinary request/network information. The plugin does not send those checks through a Kitgenix proxy. CSV and JSON Portability Import/export tools are available for administrators who need to move links between WordPress environments or update them in bulk. CSV output includes protection against spreadsheet-formula injection, and JSON is available where a structured interchange format is more convenient. Import processing validates and normalises incoming records and uses bounded batch sizes. Existing records can be matched according to the supported import workflow instead of every import being treated as a completely new link. REST API for Affiliate Links The authenticated REST namespace is: kitgenix-affiliate-link-manager/v1 The codebase implements routes for listing, creating, reading, updating and deleting links, plus import/export, enable/disable, duplication, click-reset, health-check, destination-history and destination-restore actions. Collection requests support common filters such as search, group, tag, enabled state, ordering and pagination. REST management is protected by the plugin's management capability checks; the plugin does not expose anonymous link administration. The block editor's read-only GET /links/picker search route only needs the edit_posts capability. WP-CLI The command base is: wp kitgenix-affiliate link Implemented commands include get, create, update, disable, enable, duplicate, reset-clicks, check-health, history, restore-destination, delete, export and import. These commands make the plugin suitable for scripted migrations, deployment workflows and administrators who prefer command-line management. Privacy-Focused, WordPress-Native Storage Link records, taxonomies, settings, logs and aggregate analytics are stored in WordPress or the site's own database. The plugin uses WordPress posts, metadata, taxonomies, options, scheduled events, the HTTP API, REST API and capability/nonce controls. There is no remote Kitgenix click-tracking account required to create or use links. External network activity is limited to actions that inherently require it, such as redirecting a visitor to the destination, checking a destination's health, retrieving public Kitgenix plugin information for the shared admin Hub, or loading the disclosed admin font service. Typical Use Cases

• Affiliate marketing links in comparison articles and product reviews.
• Branded /go/ links in newsletters or social campaigns.
• Stable URLs for printed material and QR codes.
• Time-limited promotions that should start or expire automatically.
• Campaign links that need a safe fallback after an offer ends.
• Testing or distributing traffic across multiple destinations.
• Agencies managing many partner links from one WordPress dashboard.
• Sites that need aggregate click reporting without visitor-level profiling.

2.2.0 (30 October 2026)

• Fix: Sequential rotation could stick to one destination on sites running a persistent object cache (Redis, Memcached), because an atomic click-count update bypassed WordPress's post meta cache. The cache is now cleared immediately after each click is recorded.
• Fix: The network-wide click total could drift under concurrent traffic. It's now updated with an atomic SQL increment instead of a read-then-write, the same approach already used for each link's own click count.
• Security/Improved: Redirects are no longer cacheable by page caches and CDNs, which could otherwise freeze rotation/scheduling/expiry, skip click counting, and let search engines index short /go/ URLs. Redirects now send no-cache headers and X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, set the DONOTCACHEPAGE/DONOTCACHEDB constants, and exclude the redirect prefix from WP Rocket.
• New: Added an Affiliate Link picker to the block editor. Choose "Affiliate link" from the rich-text toolbar's More menu to search saved links by name or slug and insert their branded short URL. The link's rel value is applied automatically, with an optional "Open in new tab" toggle. If no text is selected, the link name is inserted as the anchor text.
• New: Added GET /links/picker to the REST API. It is a lightweight name/slug search for the editor picker, available to users with edit_posts (filterable via kitgenix_affiliate_picker_capability). It returns names and short URLs only, never destination URLs.
• New: Added Destination History. Every destination change, including the original address when a link is created, is recorded with who made it, when, and where it came from (Admin, REST API, WP-CLI, Import, Duplicate or Restore). Up to 50 entries are kept per link, filterable via kitgenix_affiliate_destination_history_limit.
• New: The Edit Link screen now has a Destination History panel with one-click "Restore previous" and "Restore original" actions. A new "History" row action on the Links table opens it.
• New: Added GET /links/{id}/history and POST /links/{id}/history/{entry}/restore to the REST API.
• New: Added history and restore-destination WP-CLI subcommands.
• Improved: Destination restores are recorded in the Log tab.
• Fix: The shared "kitgenix" icon collection/icon was registered unconditionally on init, so on a site running more than one Kitgenix plugin, every plugin after the first to load triggered an "Icon collection is already registered" notice. It is now only registered if not already present.
• Improved: Raised the minimum PHP version to 8.2 (Requires PHP: 8.2). The activation check now also blocks activation on PHP versions below 8.2.
• Improved: Tested up to WordPress 7.4, and reviewed for compatibility with PHP 8.2 to 8.5. The full codebase passes syntax checks on PHP 8.5 and a PHPCompatibility scan for PHP 8.2–8.5, and uses no dynamic properties or functions deprecated in PHP 8.2–8.5.
• Dev: Removed the PluginScore verification code from the readme, as Kitgenix Plugin Score has been discontinued.
• Dev: Bumped the version to 2.2.0 across the plugin.
• Documentation: Shortened the readme's Description section and moved the detailed feature write-ups into a new Other Notes section, so the plugin directory no longer truncates the Description for exceeding the 2,500-character limit.
• Documentation: Regenerated the .pot translation template for 2.2.0.
• Documentation: The readme changelog now lists only the current release. The full release history is in CHANGELOG.md.

Full release history is available in the plugin's CHANGELOG.md file.