GT Link Manager is a lightweight WordPress plugin for creating and managing branded short links. Instead of sending visitors to a long, ugly affiliate URL or tracking link, you send them to a clean URL on your own domain — something like yoursite.com/go/hubspot or yoursite.com/go/best-hosting. The plugin handles the redirect from there.
It’s built as a deliberate alternative to heavier link management plugins like Pretty Links. There’s no click tracking, no heatmaps, no analytics dashboard. What you get instead is a fast, reliable redirect engine with a clean admin UI and a developer-friendly architecture.
What GT Link Manager does
When someone visits a branded link on your site, the plugin intercepts the request early in the WordPress boot cycle (before any template loading), looks up the destination URL in its own database table, and redirects the visitor instantly. The whole thing is designed to add as little overhead as possible to each redirect.
Beyond redirects, the plugin gives you a full management layer in the WordPress admin. You can create and edit links, assign them to categories, set redirect types, control SEO signals like nofollow and noindex, and import/export your link library as CSV.
For developers, there’s a REST API covering every operation the admin UI can do, plus a set of actions and filters that let you hook into the redirect pipeline, override settings, and extend behavior without modifying plugin files.
Link modes
GT Link Manager supports three distinct link modes, giving you flexibility in how redirects are resolved:
Standard (default) — The classic prefix-based redirect. Links live at yoursite.com/prefix/slug (e.g., yoursite.com/go/hubspot). This is the fastest path — a direct database lookup on a unique-indexed slug column.
Direct — Prefix-free redirects. The slug is the full path, so you can create a redirect from yoursite.com/any-path without the /go/ prefix. Useful for vanity URLs, migration redirects, or catching legacy paths. Reserved WordPress paths (wp-admin, wp-content, wp-json, etc.) are automatically blocked.
Regex — Pattern-based redirects using regular expressions. The slug is a regex pattern matched against the request path. Capture groups can be substituted into the destination URL using $1, $2, etc. A dedicated regex_replacement field supports preg_replace-style substitution for complex rewrites. Regex rules run in priority order (lowest number first).
Direct and regex modes require enabling Advanced Redirects in the plugin settings. When disabled, only standard prefix-based links are resolved — zero performance overhead from the advanced features.
Core capabilities
GT Link Manager creates a custom URL prefix on your site — go by default, but you can change it to anything you like. Every standard link you create lives at yoursite.com/your-prefix/your-slug. The slug is a short identifier you define (or let the plugin generate from the link name).
You can assign each link a redirect type. The default is 301 (permanent), which is appropriate for most affiliate and outbound links. You can also use 302 (temporary) or 307 (temporary, method-preserving) when the situation calls for it.
Each link supports rel attributes — nofollow, sponsored, and ugc — which get sent in response headers. You can also mark a link as noindex to append an X-Robots-Tag: noindex header on the redirect response.
Links can be organized into hierarchical categories, tagged with a comma-separated tag field, and annotated with private notes. Categories track a link count automatically so you always know how many links are assigned to each one.
What it intentionally doesn’t do
Click tracking and analytics are absent by design. The plugin doesn’t log redirect events, store visitor data, or build reporting dashboards. If you want tracking, the gtlm_before_redirect action fires before every redirect, and you can use it to send data wherever you like.
There’s no branded domain mapping. All links live on your primary WordPress domain under the configured prefix (or at any path with direct/regex modes). If you need links on a separate short domain, that’s outside the scope of this plugin.
Technology baseline
GT Link Manager requires WordPress 6.4 or higher and PHP 8.0 or higher. It uses two custom database tables rather than WordPress posts and post meta, which eliminates the overhead of CPT-based approaches and keeps queries simple and fast.
The block editor integration is compiled with @wordpress/scripts and registers as a RichText format type, giving you a link search popover directly in the Gutenberg toolbar. The admin-side JavaScript is vanilla JS with no framework dependency.
Plugin version
This documentation covers GT Link Manager version 1.6.0.