The Simple URLs plugin is a great tool for managing links (i.e. affiliate links). It not only manages your links, it also masks them and lets you know how many clicks a particular URL has received. This plugin is one of my most frequently used plugins because it’s useful for almost any type of website, especially those doing any affiliate marketing.

Although Simple URLs is a terrific plugin, it lacks one feature that I believe would be helpful for most users. Out of the box, Simple URLs sets the rewrite slug for your links to “go”. For example, I use Simple URLs on EngageWP.com and one of my outgoing links is https://www.engagewp.com/go/studiopress (my StudioPress affiliate link). Notice the “go” part in that URL? That’s the rewrite slug for the Simple URLs permalinks. While it may not be a big deal for most users (including me), some people might not like this and would prefer to change it to something more custom. Unfortunately, there is no setting to change this. To change it, you need to adjust one line of code. The change is actually a very simple one. The Simple URLs plugin contains just one PHP file, called plugin.php. Inside this file on line 51 is the rewrite parameter for the Simple URLs post type. To change the slug to whatever you want, just replace “go” with your custom slug. An example could be:

'rewrite' => array( 'slug' => 'link', 'with_front' => false )

On a related note, I actually downloaded the plugin recently and added a custom option to the General Settings page just to play around. This setting accepts your custom rewrite slug and replaces the default. It’s a pretty simple modification. If you’d like the code, let me know.