Do you want to create a coupon site on WordPress?
Coupon sites help customers find discounts and deals online while earning money from affiliate commissions.
In this article, we will show you how to easily create a coupon website in WordPress without any special skills.
What is a coupon site?
A coupon website is an affiliate marketing site that helps customers find coupons and deals. It is a popular online business idea that has grown rapidly as online shopping becomes more common.
These websites make money online from affiliate marketing and partnerships. Basically, they earn a commission every time a user makes a purchase using their coupon code or clicking on their affiliate link.
For example, we have our own deals section on WPLearn where we’ve partnered with leading WordPress companies to offer our users exclusive WordPress coupons and deals.
For more details on how partnerships and affiliates work, check out our complete guide to affiliate marketing for beginners.
That being said, let’s take a look at how you can easily build a coupon website on WordPress and grow it successfully.
Getting started with your coupon website
To create a coupon website, you’ll need a domain name and a web hosting account.
A domain name is what users will type into their browsers to get to your site (example: wpbeginner.com). A web hosting account is where all the files for your website are stored. You can learn more in our guide on the difference between domain name and hosting.
Domain names typically cost $16.99 per year and website hosting starts at $7.99 per month. This is a bit expensive for a small business if you are just starting out.
Luckily, the folks at Bluehost have agreed to offer a generous discount to WPBeginner users with a free domain name and SSL certificate. You can start for $2.75 per month.
→ Click here to claim this exclusive offer from Bluehost ←
Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.
Once you’ve signed up for hosting, Bluehost will automatically install WordPress and you’ll be able to log in from your account dashboard.
If you need help, check out our full WordPress installation tutorial for more detailed instructions.
Setting Up a WordPress Coupon Site
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Coupons plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
After activation, you can go to the Coupons » Add New page to create your first coupon. Simply provide a title for your coupon and then a long description in the content area.
Below the editor, you will see a ‘WP Coupon Details’ box. This is where you’ll add your coupon code, affiliate URL, call to action, expiration date, and more.
Finally, you need to set up a featured image for your coupon. We recommend using images of the same size for all your coupon featured images to ensure your coupon grid layout looks perfect.
Once you’re done, you can save your changes or post your coupon.
After you’ve added some coupons, you can visit the coupon archive to see all your coupons. WP Coupons will automatically create a coupon page on your WordPress website. It is usually found at a URL like this: https://example.com/coupons/
You can also click on a coupon title to view the individual coupon page with a more detailed description.
Display Coupons on Your WordPress Website
By default, WP Coupons allows you to use the coupon archive template to display all your coupons at once.
However, the default template may not work well with your WordPress theme, or you simply want to display your coupons on some other page.
To disable the default coupon archive page, simply go to Settings » WP Coupons.On the Coupon Archive tab, uncheck the “Enable custom template” option.
You can now use the shortcode [wp_coupons] anywhere on your WordPress website to display all of your coupons.
Simply edit a blog post or page where you want to display your coupon grid. On the post editing screen, click the Add Block button ( ) and the shortcode block in your content area.
Now, copy and paste the shortcode [wp_coupons] inside the block settings. Don’t forget to update or publish your changes.
This is what it looked like on our demo site:
Displaying individual coupons on a post or page
WP Coupons also makes it easy to display a single coupon within your WordPress posts and pages. This feature is useful when you write content to promote a specific product or partner.
To display a single coupon, you need to go to the Coupons » Coupons page and click the Edit link under the coupon you want to add to a post or page.
On the coupon editing screen, scroll down to the ‘WP Coupon Details’ box and you will see a shortcode in the bottom right corner of that section. You will need to copy this shortcode.
Now you need to edit the post or page where you want to display the coupon. On the post editing screen, click the Add Block button ( ) and then select the Shortcode block.
Go ahead and paste the shortcode you copied above and save your post/page. You can now preview your content to see your individual shortcode in action.
Display Coupons in a Sidebar Widget
WP Coupons offers two ways to display coupons in WordPress sidebar widgets.
To display a random coupon in your WordPress sidebar, you can go to the Appearance » Widgets page and add the ‘WP Coupons Widget’ to your sidebar.
You can provide a title for your widget and then click the Save button to store your changes.
You can now preview the widget on your website to see it display a random coupon in the sidebar.
If you want to display specific coupons in your WordPress sidebar, you can use the shortcode method.
Simply add the ‘Text’ widget to your WordPress sidebar and then add the shortcode [coupon id=”19″] in the text area.
Don’t forget to replace id with the ID of the coupon you want to display. You can find a coupon shortcode simply by editing it, as shown earlier in this guide.
To display multiple coupons in your sidebar, you can add multiple shortcodes with coupon IDs. This is how it looked on our test website.
Changing Coupon Style
WP Coupons provides limited options for choosing colors and styles for coupon grids and panels.
You can find them by visiting the Settings » WP Coupons page and switching to the Styling Options tab.
From here, you can choose font colors and sizes to match your WordPress theme or design requirements.
Once you’re done, don’t forget to click the Save Changes button to store your settings.
Managing and Growing Your Coupon Site
There are many affiliate marketing tools and plugins you can use to manage and grow your coupon website.
Here are some of the essential tools you’ll need.
1. Pretty Links Pro
Pretty Links Pro is a WordPress affiliate link manager plugin. It allows you to shorten long and ugly affiliate URLs into short and clean URLs.
It also helps you easily track, group, rank and manage your affiliate links. It’s a huge time saver for affiliate marketers.
For example, if you promote a partner in multiple locations on your website and suddenly change their affiliate links, you can simply update the link in one location and it will automatically update in all others.
Alternative: ThirstyAffiliates
2. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It shows you where your users come from and what they do when they visit your website.
It also allows you to easily set up conversion tracking on your website so you can make data-driven decisions to grow your business.
For example, you can see which coupons get the most clicks and which coupons get views but no clicks. You can then enhance those coupon offers to increase your click-through rate.
3. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the #1 conversion optimization software on the market. It allows you to easily convert website visitors into subscribers and customers.
OptinMonster gives you incredibly powerful tools to promote coupons and deals on your website. It comes with lightbox popups, countdown timers, header and footer banners, slider popups, spin to win popups and more.
All of these tools help promote coupons and deals on your website, so you can increase your conversion rate and increase your affiliate income.
We hope this article has helped you learn how to easily create a coupon site in WordPress. Next, you’ll want to check out our comparison of the best live chat software for small businesses, or our guide on choosing the best web design software.
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