Links are a fundamental part of every website. Sharing information and creating links is one of the most important elements of building a website or an online business.
Your website’s SEO relies heavily on link development and management. For the most part, search engines employ links to rank web pages, so whether or not your website appears on page 1 or page 10 of Google’s results is directly related to the number of links pointing to it.
Suppose your website includes outdated links, which lead to an error page. In that case, visitors might think that the website is neglected or poorly managed, resulting in them never returning to your website. However, links require management and need to be regularly updated and checked on.
Trafic loss can be easily avoided by getting the right link management plugin that will take care of all your links. By the end of this article, you will become familiar with six free link management plugins for WordPress and find out which one stands out as the most convenient and easy to use. Let’s take a look.
#1 WP Links
WP Links is an excellent solution for completely managing all your links. Within this plugin, you can manage all your internal and external links, open links in a new window or a tab, set follow or nofollow, add noopener and noreferrer, and add ugc (User Generated Content) and sponsored values to rel.
Within WP Links, you can also add Link Icons to your external links, ensuring that visitors will notice that they are about to leave the space of your website. The plugin is user-friendly and easy to use, with no coding or web design knowledge.
Apart from its free variant, WP Links is also available in the PRO version, which includes even more convenient features, such as Link Scanner, which scans all links on your site, and Link Rules, a feature that creates advanced link rules for the specific link groups of your choice.
PRO version also comes with an Exit Confirmation feature, an advantageous and completely customizable safety option that you should consider setting up on your website.
#2 Broken Link Checker
If you are looking for a single plugin that will take care of all the broken links on your website, you should consider Broken Link Checker. While monitoring all the internal and external links, it will notify you via email or the Dashboard about any links that do not work and missing images and redirects.
It is highly configurable and will even prevent search engines from following the broken links, ensuring you can fix them before the visitors find out.
#3 Pretty Links
With Pretty Links, you can give your links a makeover, making them short and sweet. Instead of using a link-sharing service such as tinyurl.com or bit.ly, you can shorten your links using your existing domain.
Apart from that, Pretty Links tracks all the entries on your URL, providing you a report of a browser or a host from which the click came, which can help guide you towards which way you should promote the content.
#4 Linker
With its user-friendly admin interface, Linker is the simplest tool to make a short link within your domain and monitor outbound link hits from your website using tools like Google Analytics.
It also allows you to efficiently manage the website’s 301 redirects, track affiliate links, and create short links to your posts. Like Pretty Links, Linker will report to you about the hits your links get, ensuring you are up to date with all the traffic on your website.
#5 Custom Permalinks
With Custom Permalinks, you can create the website layout you prefer in minutes. Any post, page, tag, or category can change its URL to anything you choose, while the old permalinks will correctly redirect to the new URL.
This plugin will only assign custom permalinks for posts, pages, tags, or categories. It won’t automatically apply a category’s custom permalink to the entries within that category or full permalink structures.
#6 WP Links Page
WP Links Page makes it possible to create a link gallery accompanied by the screenshot of each link, which will save you the time of finding the images for each site. Screenshots will refresh automatically whenever you set them to twice daily, every two days, weekly or monthly.
In the same way, you usually add and edit posts, you can customize links. Sort and display links however you like, whether in a grid or a list. WP Links Page also provides a shortcode to showcase your links wherever you want them on the site.
Conclusion
If you want your website or online business to be functional and up-to-date, taking care of its links is a good way to start. The right link management plugin will make sure to get the most out of your website’s traffic and keep the good SEO ratings on the search engines, fixing the problem before visitors ever know that a link on the website was broken.
Even though WordPress offers an abundance of link management solutions, the choice should depend solely on your preferences and the needs of your website or online business. Even though all the free plugins mentioned above offer great features, WP Links stands out as the one which covers the most convenient ones among a single plugin.
Apart from that, it takes less than a minute to install and is compatible with every theme, which makes it a solution that everyone, regardless of their knowledge, should include in their WordPress admin interface. If the features included in the free version are not enough for what you want to accomplish, WP Links also offers a great PRO solution, approved by more than 200,000 happy users.
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