10 Best WordPress Plugin Affiliate Programs to Join and Make Money

Affiliate marketing is an excellent way for bloggers and website owners to earn passive income. By promoting relevant products or services, you can generate commissions from sales you refer without doing all the work of creating the product yourself.

One popular affiliate niche is WordPress plugins. As the leading content management system, WordPress powers over 40% of all websites. And most WordPress sites utilize plugins to add advanced functionality, improve performance, and more. So there is huge demand for quality WordPress plugins that address common needs.

If you have an audience interested in WordPress, promoting plugin affiliate programs allows you to recommend useful tools to your readers while earning nice commissions. In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll share the 10 best WordPress plugin affiliate programs to join as an affiliate.

Why Promote WordPress Plugin Affiliate Programs?

Here are some of the top reasons to consider promoting WordPress plugin affiliate programs:

Recurrent need: Websites need to constantly adopt new plugins to add features, update existing ones, etc. This creates a recurring demand you can tap into.
High commissions: Many top plugin companies offer generous recurring commissions of 20-40% per sale. Plugins are digital products with high margins.
Passive income: Once you drive a sale, you earn a commission on that customer‘s renewals without additional work. Lifetime value of a buyer can be very lucrative.
Synergy for your audience: Your readers likely use WordPress. Quality plugins solve problems and improve their experience. So you‘re providing value.
Easy to promote: Plugin companies provide you with links, promo materials, and assets to easily integrate into your content and promotions.

If you want to boost your affiliate promotions, WordPress plugin programs tick all the boxes. Let‘s look at 10 of the best ones to join.

Social Warfare is one of the most popular social sharing plugins for WordPress. It makes it easy for visitors to share your content on social networks.

With Social Warfare, you can:

Add social sharing buttons for leading networks
Choose from a variety of professional designs
Display buttons prominently before/after content
Get detailed analytics on social engagement

The social sharing data can even help your blog posts rank better in search engines.

Key features:

Supports share counts to show social proof
Integrates with Google Analytics
Options for floating sidebar buttons
Automatic Pinterest image sharing
Follow/subscribe action links

Social Warfare has a simple affiliate program that pays 30% commissions on sales. You‘ll earn on initial purchases as well as renewals via their lifetime cookie. Payouts are handled through PayPal when you reach the $50 minimum threshold.

To get started, browse their affiliate resources and register for an account. Then you can grab affiliate links to promote the social sharing plugin through your website, social media, YouTube, email lists, etc.

2. ShortPixel

ShortPixel is a popular image optimization plugin for WordPress. It compresses images in real-time to reduce file sizes without sacrificing quality.

This improves page load speeds and SEO by enabling faster image loading. ShortPixel can optimize any image upload on your WordPress site.

ShortPixel

Benefits of ShortPixel:

Lossless compression technology
Convert images to next-gen formats like WebP
Optimize all past media library images
Integrates with major CDNs like Cloudflare
Improve Core Web Vitals scores

ShortPixel has a generous affiliate program that pays 30% commissions for each sale driven. You‘ll earn on renewals too thanks to their lifetime cookie policy.

Once you cross the $500 threshold, you can request payouts via Payoneer, PayPal, bank transfer, etc. Otherwise, earnings are paid out each month via PayPal.

3. RafflePress

RafflePress is a popular WordPress plugin to create giveaways and contests to grow your email list. It comes packed with handy features:

Create unlimited contests, giveaways, sweepstakes
Collect emails and grow your email list
Display contest widgets anywhere
Integrates with email services like MailChimp
Mobile responsive designs
Detailed analytics and reports

The templates and customizable options make it easy to create engaging contests to capture leads:

RafflePress

RafflePress has a nice affiliate program that pays up to $39.90 per sale referred. You can promote via banners, text links and more.

Their cookies last for 120 days. And payouts are handled every month when you exceed $50 in pending commissions. RafflePress supports PayPal payments.

4. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the most popular WordPress caching plugin, with over 1 million active installs. It can dramatically speed up your WordPress site by caching pages, leveraging browser caching, lazy loading images, and more.

Faster load times help improve visitor experience, pageviews, conversions and search rankings.

WP Rocket

Key WP Rocket features:

Caches entire pages and CDN support
Minifies CSS, JS and HTML code
Optimizes images and leverages lazy loading
Boosts Google PageSpeed scores
Preload key site links for faster rendering

Their affiliate program rewards you with $49.80 commissions per sale. You‘ll earn 20% commissions on all purchases driven by your link.

WP Rocket provides excellent affiliate resources like banners, text links, coupons, and product info to help you promote their caching plugin.

5. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is the highest-rated backup plugin in the WordPress directory. It‘s been downloaded over 6 million times and active on over 1 million sites.

The plugin allows users to easily backup their WordPress site to the cloud or download a backup archive:

UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus enables backups to destinations like:

Cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox
Amazon S3 and other S3-compatible services
Backup to FTP servers
Local backups to your computer
Database backups

Their affiliate program provides a generous 30% commission rate on each referral. You‘ll earn money from new sales driven as well as recurring renewals.

Affiliates get access to banner ads, text links, and other promotional resources to integrate UpdraftPlus into your website and content.

6. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a popular WordPress gallery plugin with over 1 million downloads. It makes it easy for users to create responsive image and video galleries.

You can display galleries anywhere on your WordPress site using shortcodes, widgets, template tags, and more.

Some key features include:

Photo galleries with slideshows and lightboxes
Video galleries with popup lightboxes
Social sharing options
Full responsiveness
SEO-optimized galleries
Album/tag organization
developer-friendly hooks and filters

As an affiliate, you can earn a 20% commission for each sale you generate for Envira Gallery. Their cookies last for 120 days so you‘ll earn on recurrings sales too.

Payouts are handled each month once you pass the $50 threshold. You‘ll have access to banners, text links and other promo assets to drive conversions.

7. OptinMonster

OptinMonster makes it easy for WordPress users to create popup forms, slide-ins, and other "conversion elements" to capture more email subscribers.

It helps grow your email lists by converting website visitors into subscribers with targeted opt-in forms.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster supports exit-intent popups, scroll triggered popups, floating bars, slide-ins, and more. Popups are designed to convert with action-focused copy and attention-grabbing animations.

Their affiliate program pays $118 per sale referred with a 20% commission rate. You have unlimited scope to promote OptinMonster through your website, social, videos, podcasts, etc.

They provide useful landing pages, promo videos, custom coupons, and banners to help drive conversions. Affiliates get dedicated tracking dashboards to monitor their campaigns.

8. MemberPress

MemberPress is the most powerful WordPress membership plugin for creating subscription sites. It allows you to easily sell memberships, restrict access to content, manage members, and more.

Businesses use MemberPress to create coaching programs, online courses, paid communities, and other membership sites within WordPress.

With MemberPress, you can:

Create and sell unlimited membership levels
Configure subscription pricing and access rules
Manage members and automatically renew subscriptions
Integrate member forums and discussion areas
Drip feed content to members over time
Offer single payments or recurring memberships
Connect payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal

Their affiliate program provides a 25% commission rate per referral. You‘ll earn monthly payouts delivered via PayPal when your balance exceeds $50.

MemberPress equips affiliates with helpful marketing materials like branded banners, promo emails, sample ads, and coupons.

9. CSS Hero

CSS Hero allows WordPress users to customize any theme visually using their intuitive point-and-click editor.

You can change styles, colors, spacing, fonts, and design elements easily without coding.

CSS Hero

CSS Hero enables customizations for:

Typography like font size, style, colors
Buttons, forms and icons
Page layout with responsive breakpoints
Individual page styles
Custom CSS and CSS variables

It‘s a great tool for web designers and developers to speed up WordPress theme customizations.

Their affiliate program pays a generous 40% commission per referral. You‘ll earn money from the initial purchase as well as subsequent renewals.

Payouts are sent each month via PayPal when your account balance exceeds $50. CSS Hero provides banners, text links, and other marketing assets to promote their plugin.

10. MailPoet

MailPoet is the #1 newsletter plugin for WordPress. Used on over 300,000 websites, it lets you easily create and send email newsletters from WordPress.

With MailPoet, you can:

Design beautiful responsive email newsletters
Collect newsletter subscribers on your site
Send unlimited emails to your lists
Track opens, clicks, and conversions
Integrate with services like Mailchimp
Schedule email broadcasts

The drag-and-drop editor makes newsletter creation easy:

MailPoet

As an affiliate, you can earn 20% commissions when users purchase MailPoet plans you referred to them. They offer lifetime cookies so you‘ll also earn from recurring renewals.

Wrap Up

Promoting WordPress plugin affiliate programs is a great way to earn commissions while providing value to your audience.

Plugins solve common problems that many WordPress users face. The top programs pay nice recurring commissions of 20-40% per sale.

You can leverage promotional resources provided by each company to seamlessly integrate affiliate links into your content. Affiliate marketing for WordPress plugins takes the effort out of product creation while monetizing your audience.

So explore some of the top WordPress plugin affiliate programs showcased above and consider joining ones that align with your audience and website niche.