Affiliate marketing on WordPress: the four ways to add an Amazon link, and what each one costs

You do not need a plugin to put an Amazon affiliate link on a WordPress page. You need one when you want the link to stay correct — and quite a lot of what sits between those two sentences is where new affiliate sites get into trouble, usually without noticing.

This is the practical half: the four ways to get a link onto a page, what each one costs, the attribute WordPress will not add for you and Google expects to see, where the disclosure has to sit, and which of it all is impossible until Amazon issues you an API credential. If what you want first is the wider question of what these tools do and what Amazon permits them to do, that is the piece on Amazon affiliate plugins.

The four ways to add an Amazon link to a WordPress page

They form a ladder, and most sites climb it in order without ever deciding to. Each rung buys something and costs something.

How	What it gives you	What it costs	API key?
A text link in a paragraph	Select the words, paste the tagged URL. Works in every theme, survives every migration, never breaks.	Nothing looks like a product. Conversion rests entirely on the sentence around it.	No
A button block	Visible, tappable, and core WordPress — no dependency to maintain.	Every button is edited by hand. Twenty of them is twenty edits when a URL changes.	No
A hand-built box	Image, title, button in a group block. Looks like a product box and costs nothing.	It is frozen. And the price is the trap — see below, because typing one in is not merely untidy.	No
A plugin	One shortcode or block per product; titles, images and prices arrive from Amazon and stay current.	A dependency, and the product data half only works once Amazon has issued you a credential.	For product data

The honest summary of that table: three of the four rungs need nothing from Amazon but a tracking tag, which you have from the day you sign up. The fourth needs a credential you have to earn. That ordering is worth knowing before you buy anything, because it is the reverse of how the category is usually sold.

What has to be in the link — and what WordPress will not add for you

An Amazon affiliate link is an ordinary product URL with your tracking ID appended. Nothing else in it is load-bearing, and everything else in it can usually be deleted.

The quickest way to get a correct one is SiteStripe, the bar Amazon puts across the top of its own pages when you are logged in as an Associate. It builds the link with your tag already in it, which removes the commonest beginner error — a beautiful product box pointing at an untagged URL, earning nothing for however long it takes somebody to notice.

Now the part WordPress does not do for you. Paste a link into the editor and you get a plain <a href>. Google’s guidance on qualifying outbound links asks for affiliate links to carry rel="sponsored", and it is explicit that sites which do not qualify such links can pick up a manual action or be handled algorithmically. rel="nofollow" is accepted for the same purpose; sponsored is the one that describes what the link actually is.

The block editor has no field for it. Three ways round that, in ascending order of how much you will forget about it afterwards:

• Edit the block as HTML. Reliable, free, and you will forget on the fourth link.
• Tick “open in new tab”. WordPress then writes rel="noreferrer noopener" — which is not the same thing and does not qualify the link. Worth stating plainly, because it looks like the box that handles this.
• Let something add it automatically — a link plugin or an affiliate plugin that writes the attribute on every link it renders. This is the rung where a plugin quietly earns part of its keep, separately from anything to do with product data.

Buttons and redirects: the two places people get caught

A button is the highest-converting thing on the ladder that needs no credential, so it is worth getting the wording right. Amazon is specific about what may sit on one, and the line is not where most people assume.

The short version: write your own words, do not reach for Amazon’s logo or the Smile design, and do not modify any mark. The full account of what a button may say covers the edge cases, including the phrasings that look safe and are not.

The second trap is a WordPress habit rather than an Amazon one. Link-cloaking plugins are popular here — the sort that turn every outbound link into yoursite.com/go/something — and read quickly, Amazon’s terms look like a ban on exactly that.

What that means for a WordPress site in practice: a redirect that a reader could reasonably work out leads to Amazon is a different thing from one built to conceal it. If you run pretty links, the safe pattern is a path that names the destination and a disclosure the reader has already passed.

The same test decides a bigger question, if you were ever planning to buy traffic: an intermediate page between an advert and a merchant is what the industry calls a bridge page, and both Google Ads and Amazon have written rules about it — one of them new in April 2026, and rather blunter than the other.

The disclosure, and the WordPress mechanism that makes it stick

Two separate authorities want this and they want slightly different things. Amazon’s Operating Agreement requires you to state the relationship. Advertising regulators want it where a reader will actually see it, before the click rather than after.

Neither is satisfied by a line in the footer, and neither is satisfied by a separate disclosure page on its own. The disclosure has to be near the links, in language a reader notices.

WordPress has a good answer to this that most sites do not use: a synced pattern — reusable blocks, as they were called before — holding the disclosure sentence, dropped in above the first affiliate link of every post. Edit it once and every post updates. A block theme can go further and put it in a template part so it appears on every single post without anybody remembering to add it. Both beat the alternative, which is retyping a sentence eighty times and having eleven versions of it.

What changes with an API key, and what to do until you have one

Everything above works on the day you join. What does not work on that day is anything Amazon owns and keeps current — the product title, the product image, the price, availability, the star rating. Those come from the API, and the API is gated behind sales you have not made yet: three qualifying sales within 180 days before a credential is issued at all, and a rolling requirement afterwards to keep it.

Which produces the circle every new affiliate site runs into. You buy a plugin to build your first product boxes; the plugin cannot fetch a single title because you have not sold anything; you cannot sell anything because you have no product boxes. It resolves, but not on day one, and knowing it in advance changes what you build first. The requirements piece sets out the whole shape of it.

So build the three lower rungs and wait. Your own photographs, your own descriptions, tagged text links and buttons. All of it is permitted, none of it needs a credential, and a page built that way converts perfectly well.

With exactly one exception, and it is the one people reach for first: do not type in a price. Not because it will go stale — because a hand-typed price is not a permitted source. Amazon requires prices to come from the API and to be shown with the time they were retrieved unless they are refreshed hourly, and a number you typed satisfies neither condition. A button reading Check price on Amazon with no figure on it sidesteps the problem completely, and converts about as well as a figure that might be wrong.

Common questions

Disclosure, since this is our own site: Doozly is one of the plugins described above. It builds tagged boxes with no credential at all, and talks to Amazon’s API in the free version once you have one.