Inserting Links into Your Content

LinkCentral offers multiple ways to insert your custom links into your WordPress content, ensuring flexibility and ease of use across various editing environments and page builders.

Link Types

There are three ways for inserting links into your content. All three allow you to leverage LinkCentral’s powerful link management and tracking features but there are a few differences.

A. Synchronized Links

What is it? Synchronized links are designed to automatically update across your site whenever you make changes to the link’s attributes or slug in the LinkCentral dashboard.

How does it work? Upon inserting a link, LinkCentral adds a generic link with an identifier (data-linkcentral-id-sync). On the front-end, LinkCentral tracks and updates those links dynamically with the latest settings.

When to use? This feature is beneficial for users who frequently update their links and want to ensure that all instances of the link remain the same.

⚠️ Each WordPress theme and plugin behaves differently. Some might not allow LinkCentral to search and replace links. Use another link type if that happens.

B. Direct Links

What is it? Direct links are regular URLs inserted directly into your content. Upon insertion, all the latest settings (such as slug and attributes) are applied. Unlike synchronized links, those settings do not automatically update if you change links in LinkCentral’s dashboard.

How does it work? When you insert a direct link, LinkCentral fetches the latest settings once (slug, attributes, et cetera), and inserts it into your content as a regular link.

When to use? Direct links are ideal for situations where you need a stable, unchanging link. This type of link is straightforward and remains unchanged unless manually edited, and has 100% compatibility across the entire WordPress ecosystem.

Of course, you can manually paste a custom short URL into your content, but in that case LinkCentral won’t update it with the latest settings upon insertion.

C. Shortcodes

What is it? Shortcodes use WordPress’s shortcode API to insert links into your content. This method functions similarly to Synchronized links but utilizes Shortcode formatting.

How does it work? LinkCentral generates and inserts a shortcode into your content. This is processed by WordPress on the front-end to dynamically render the link with the latest settings.

When to use? Shortcode links are particularly useful for users who want to leverage WordPress’s shortcode API to manage links. They work in a similar way as Synchronized Links, but some users might prefer the Shortcode format.

Read more about Shortcodes

Editor Integrations

1. Gutenberg Block Editor

LinkCentral integrates seamlessly with the Gutenberg editor, providing a custom button in the toolbar for easy link insertion. This method works for both text and button blocks.

Read more about Gutenberg

2. Classic Editor

If you are using the Classic Editor (also called: TinyMCE), LinkCentral adds a custom button to the toolbar. This allows you to quickly insert and edit LinkCentral links within your content.

Read more about Classic Editor

Many content editors make use of the Classic Editor, such as Elementor and Beaver Builder.

3. Elementor Page Builder

Elementor uses the Classic Visual Editor when you are writing content. However, Elementor also uses Dynamic Tags and LinkCentral integrates with this seamlessly. This allows you to insert and update LinkCentral links within your Elementor content.

Read more about Elementor

More details