Pretty Links or Lasso: which WordPress link tool fits your site
If you recommend products or services on your WordPress site, you have probably noticed how ugly affiliate links are: a long string of question marks, ID numbers and tracking codes. A link tool swaps that for something short and readable, like yoursite.com/recommends/email-tool, and tells you who clicked.
Two plugins come up most often: Pretty Links and Lasso. They solve the same problem in different ways, and the right one depends on what your site mostly does.
The short answer
- Pick Pretty Links if you want one place to manage every link on your site: affiliate links, campaign links, redirects from old pages, links in your newsletter.
- Pick Lasso if your site is mostly product reviews and recommendations, especially Amazon products, and you want those products to show up as tidy boxes with a picture, price and button.
The rest of this post explains why.
Pretty Links shortens and tracks any link
Pretty Links has been around for over a decade. It does one job: it turns a long address into a short one on your own domain and sends the visitor on to the real destination.
That makes it useful for much more than affiliate links. You can use it to redirect an old page to a new one, give a marketing campaign a link you can say out loud, or track which newsletter links get clicked.
Inside your WordPress dashboard you can:
- Choose the kind of redirect for each link (permanent or temporary).
- Mark links as “nofollow” or “sponsored”, which tells search engines the link is paid.
- Sort links into categories by partner, campaign or product.
- Import a batch of links from a spreadsheet.
- Pick an existing link from a button in the editor while you write, instead of hunting for it.
The free version on WordPress.org covers link shortening, click counts and categories. The paid version adds more detailed reports, automatic keyword linking (it turns chosen words across your site into links for you) and link rotation, which splits clicks between several destinations so you can test which page does better.
Lasso turns products into display boxes
Lasso is built for one kind of site: the kind that earns money by recommending products. Instead of creating a link, you add a product to a library. Lasso then gives you both a short link and a ready-made product box you can drop into any post.
One product entry can show up as a plain link in one post, a box with a picture and button in another, and a row in a comparison table in a third. Change the product once and every post that uses it updates.
Its biggest draw is Amazon. Connect your Amazon Associates account and Lasso can pull in a product’s title, image, price and rating, and keep the price current. Outdated prices are one of the quickest ways to lose a reader’s trust, so that saves real work on a review site. Amazon’s own rules decide who gets access to that product data, so check your Associates account before you count on it.
Lasso’s reports lean towards products rather than raw clicks: which products get seen, which get clicked, and which display style works best.
The real difference is what each tool assumes about you
Pretty Links assumes you have links of all kinds and want them tidy and tracked. It stores very little about each one, which keeps it quick and simple.
Lasso assumes you are a product reviewer. It stores a lot about each product (pictures, prices, descriptions) so it can reuse them. That takes more setting up, especially the Amazon connection, but pays off if you write about the same products again and again.
If you run a local business site and only have a handful of partner links, Pretty Links is likely all you need. If you run a review site with hundreds of products, Lasso may save you hours.
Mistakes that cost you either way
Using the wrong kind of redirect. Use a permanent redirect for links that will not change and a temporary one only for short campaigns. Set your default once so you do not have to think about it.
No system for naming links. Decide on categories and a naming pattern before you have hundreds of links. Cleaning up later is miserable.
Forgetting the disclosure. In the US the FTC asks you to tell readers clearly when a link earns you money, before they click. Do not rely on a plugin to do that for you; put a plain sentence near the top of the post or right before the links.
Trusting automation blindly. Automatic product data can be wrong, and automatic keyword linking can turn a paragraph into a wall of links. Look at your pages now and then.
Running both plugins at once. Each one adds work to every page load. Choose one. If you truly need both, keep an eye on your page speed.
Never looking at the numbers. Both tools tell you which links get clicked. Check once a month and write more about what your readers actually click on.
Try before you commit
Pretty Links has a free version you can install today. For Lasso, check its current plans and any trial on its site before you buy. Count your links, write down what annoys you about managing them now, and pick the tool that fixes that.
If you would rather have someone set this up on your site, get in touch.
A note on where I stand
I work on Pretty Links professionally, so I am not a neutral party. I have tried to describe both tools the same way. Check each one’s current plans before you decide.