About this plugin
Squad Affiliate — the self-hosted affiliate program and referral plugin for WordPress, WooCommerce and Divi.
Run your own affiliate program directly in WordPress: recruit affiliates, track referrals, calculate commissions and pay partners — with no SaaS platform fees, no per-sale cut, and no third-party cookies.
Affiliate tracking is self-hosted and first-party, so referrals keep being
credited when ad blockers strip third-party scripts, and your affiliate data stays
in your own database rather than on someone else’s analytics platform.
Squad Affiliate is an affiliate marketing plugin built for real stores. It tracks
WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads sales, memberships, courses and donations;
it handles percentage, flat, tiered, recurring and lifetime commissions; and it
gives every affiliate a dashboard where they can find their referral link, their
clicks, their earnings and their payout history.
It is also built to feel at home in a Divi 5 site: the affiliate registration form
and the affiliate dashboard are real builder modules you drop onto a page, and
shortcodes cover every other theme.
Why a self-hosted affiliate plugin
Hosted affiliate platforms charge a monthly fee, take a percentage of the
commissions you pay, and keep your referral data. A self-hosted affiliate program
costs nothing per sale, keeps every affiliate record in your own WordPress
install, and works with the checkout you already run.
How attribution works
A visitor who arrives through an affiliate’s referral link is remembered with a
first-party cookie. When that visitor buys, the order is credited to the
affiliate. You can also tie a WooCommerce coupon or an Easy Digital Downloads
discount code to an affiliate, so a purchase that applies the code is credited
even without a referral link. When both apply, the referral link wins.
Lite (this plugin) includes
- Unlimited affiliates with first-party, ad-blocker-resistant tracking.
- Referral-link, coupon-code and direct-link attribution — a link parameter, a
ref=jane ), an affiliate’s coupon, or simply the site they
referred the visitor from.
- Short links: every affiliate can create /go/… links on your domain that credit
them and forward to any page — one of yours or one on another site.
- An affiliate who owns a website can ask that it be registered as a direct-link
domain, from their own dashboard; you approve or decline the request. Nothing is
credited, and no visitor is reattributed, until you say yes.
- Commissions: flat, percentage, per-affiliate override, and a rule engine for
per-product, per-category, per-role, per-campaign and volume-tier rates.
Recurring (subscription renewals), lifetime (a referred customer’s later
orders), multi-level overrides, signup bonuses, performance bonuses and
pay-per-lead all ship free.
- Choose what a commission is a percentage of: exclude shipping and tax, or pay
on net revenue.
- Large commissions can be held for review instead of approved automatically.
- Affiliate registration with manual or automatic approval, and a self-service
dashboard where affiliates see their referrals, clicks, earnings, team and
payout details.
- Affiliate groups with their own rates, and a leaderboard.
- Divi 5 modules — Affiliate Registration Form and Affiliate Dashboard — plus
shortcodes for the whole portal or any single screen:
[squad_affiliate_dashboard], [squad_affiliate_login],
[squad_affiliate_register], [squad_affiliate_apply].
- Personalised landing pages, built in whichever page builder you already use.
[squad_affiliate_referrer] prints the name (or company, website, country) of
the affiliate who sent the visitor, [squad_affiliate_coupon] prints their
code, and [squad_affiliate_if_referred] / [squad_affiliate_if_not_referred]
wrap the content that should only appear for one of the two.
- A creatives library — banners, text links, email swipe copy and social posts —
plus a banner builder: pick a standard ad size, write the copy, and the banner
is generated, added to your media library and saved as a creative.
- WooCommerce (HPOS-aware) and Easy Digital Downloads referral tracking, with
self-referral and one-referral-per-order guards.
- Memberships, courses and fundraising too: MemberPress, LifterLMS, Paid
Memberships Pro, LearnDash, SureCart and GiveWP, plus lead commissions from
Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WPForms and Fluent Forms.
- Payouts: approve and mark as paid by hand, export a plain batch CSV, or pay
through store credit an affiliate spends on your shop or a bank transfer you
record once sent. Affiliates choose which of those rails they get paid
through and can request a withdrawal.
- Reports: earnings over time, per-source and per-campaign performance,
conversion rates, and a monthly summary email.
- Transactional emails you can edit, preview and test-send, with your own logo,
colour and footer.
- One-click migration from eighteen other affiliate plugins, plus a CSV path for
anything else — affiliates, commission history and click logs.
- Sample data on request: a complete demo programme you can remove again in one
click, for trying the screens before you have real affiliates.
- An Abilities API surface and an MCP server, so an AI agent can read your
programme with the same capability checks a person gets.
- Privacy tools: GDPR personal-data export and erasure.
Squad Affiliate Pro adds
- AI fraud scoring at ingestion — a deterministic scorer plus a plain-English
explanation written through WordPress’s own AI Client; suspicious commissions
are auto-held, never auto-paid (and it fails open: an AI outage never blocks
your store).
- MLM matrix topologies — Unilevel, Binary, and Forced network trees.
- The PayPal Payouts API, Stripe Connect and Wise bulk-payment files as payout
rails, plus the PayPal- and Wise-shaped CSV exports each provider’s own
upload tool expects.
- Automated and scheduled payout dispatch (hands-off, one-click runs), and
loyalty points as a payout rail.
- Server-side (S2S) conversion tracking for cookieless attribution.
- Multiple programs / campaigns and affiliate networks (run several merchants).
- Affiliate ranks with rate bonuses, influencer retainers, pay-per-click
commissions, and customer advocacy (turn buyers into affiliates).
- Custom registration fields, and branded short links — affiliates name their own
link ( /go/jane ) instead of taking the generated one. Short links themselves
are free.
- Smart links: one printed link that sends a phone, a desktop, or a visitor in
another country to a different page, without reprinting the link.
- Team roles and permissions, and an audit log of every administrative action.
- Tax / KYC collection (W-9 / W-8 / 1099) with a payout gate and year-end
reports, Zapier / Make automation, FluentCRM sync, and affiliate broadcasts.
Squad Affiliate’s goal is competitive parity in the free build: Pro is reserved
for the differentiators above, not for the features every other plugin charges
for.
Squad Affiliate is part of the Squad family by WP Squad, the team behind Squad
Modules for Divi.
com/
External services
Referral tracking, commission calculation and payouts are all handled locally by
your own WordPress installation. Out of the box the plugin contacts nothing. Each
service below waits on a decision of yours — a setting you fill in, a dialog you
approve, or a permissions screen you accept — and each one names the address it
would reach; none of them is required to run an affiliate program.
Outgoing webhooks (optional, off by default)
If — and only if — you enter one or more webhook URLs under Settings, the plugin
sends an HTTP POST to each of those addresses on two events: when a referral is
recorded, and when a payout completes. You choose the addresses, so you choose
the service: your own endpoint, an automation tool such as Zapier or Make, or
nothing at all.
A referral event sends the referral and affiliate IDs, the commission amount and
currency, the order ID and the status. A payout event sends the payout ID and the
payout method. No visitor IP addresses, no customer names or addresses, and no
order contents are included. Leaving the webhook URL setting empty means no
request is ever made.
Because the destination is whatever you enter, its terms and privacy policy are
the terms and privacy policy of the service you point it at.
Sample-data download (optional, off by default, asks first)
The sample-data importer works entirely offline: a dictionary of names, tiers,
amounts and campaigns is built into the plugin, so pressing Import never contacts
anything.
Richer and translated dictionaries live in a companion public repository on
GitHub. Downloading them is a separate button, and it is refused until you have
explicitly approved the download in a dialog that names the address — no request
happens before you say yes. The request is a plain GET for a zip of
com/thewpsquad/squad-affiliate-sample-data; nothing about your
site, your affiliates or your visitors is sent, and the archive is unpacked into
your own uploads directory. You can delete the downloaded copy at any time and
the importer falls back to the built-in dictionary.
GitHub’s terms and privacy statement apply to that download:
com/site-policy
AI fraud scoring
Earlier builds could optionally call an external AI risk-scoring service. That
service has been retired and the setting that enabled it is gone. Fraud scoring
is available in Squad Affiliate Pro, where it runs locally: a deterministic PHP
scorer, with the optional plain-English explanation going through WordPress’s own
AI Client — so the provider is whichever one you have installed and keyed, and
Squad Affiliate has no AI service of its own.
Freemius (licensing and product analytics, opt-in)
Squad Affiliate uses the Freemius service to deliver Squad Affiliate Pro and its
updates, and — only if you consent — anonymous usage diagnostics. Freemius runs on
an explicit opt-in: on activation you are shown a permissions screen and can
skip it. No data is sent to Freemius unless you opt in, or you activate a Pro
licence.
When enabled, the data sent may include: your site URL, WordPress and PHP
versions, the administrator email address, active plugin and theme information,
and the Squad Affiliate version. It is used for licence validation, update
delivery and product analytics. Nothing about your affiliates, your referrals,
your commissions or your visitors is ever sent.
- Service: Freemius
- Terms of Service: https://freemius.com/terms/
- Privacy Policy: https://freemius.com/privacy/