How to See Which Links Get Clicked on Your WordPress Site

You have a blog post with a CTA button, three internal links, two affiliate links, and a navigation menu with six items. Google Analytics says the page got 2,400 views this month. But which links did those visitors actually click?

That turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer with standard WordPress tools. (If you want the short version, see our step-by-step setup guide.) Your analytics can tell you that 800 people went from this page to your pricing page — but it can't tell you whether they clicked the CTA button in the hero, the text link in paragraph four, or the "Pricing" item in the navigation menu.

This distinction matters. If you're deciding where to place a link, which CTA to keep, or whether your sidebar is worth the screen space, you need link-level data — not just page-level data.

Here's how to get it.

Why WordPress Doesn't Show Link Clicks by Default

WordPress is a content management system. It renders pages and serves them to browsers. Once a visitor is on the page, WordPress has no built-in mechanism to record which elements they interact with.

The standard analytics tools layered on top of WordPress — Google Analytics, Jetpack Stats, server-side access logs — all work at the pageview level. They track navigation between pages: someone visited Page A, then Page B, then left. But they don't record which specific element on Page A triggered the move to Page B.

This creates a blind spot. You can optimize for traffic, but you can't optimize the layout and structure of individual pages because you can't see what's working within them.

Method 1: Google Analytics 4 (Complex)

GA4 can track some link clicks, but the setup ranges from "easy but limited" to "powerful but complex."

Outbound Clicks (Built-In)

GA4's Enhanced Measurement feature includes automatic outbound click tracking. When enabled, it fires a click event whenever a visitor clicks a link that leaves your domain. This requires no setup beyond enabling Enhanced Measurement in your GA4 data stream settings.

To view this data, you'd go to Reports > Engagement > Events > click, or build an Exploration report with the "Link URL" dimension.

The limitation: This only tracks outbound links — clicks that leave your site. It tells you nothing about internal link clicks (navigation menu, content links to other posts, CTA buttons linking to your own pages).

Internal Link Clicks (Requires Google Tag Manager)

To track internal link clicks in GA4, you need Google Tag Manager. The process:

1. Install GTM on your WordPress site (via plugin or manual snippet)
2. Enable click variables in GTM (Built-In Variables > Click URL, Click Text, Click ID, Click Classes)
3. Create a trigger: Click - Just Links, filtered to URLs containing your own domain
4. Create a GA4 Event tag with a custom event name like internal_link_click, passing parameters for link URL, link text, and page path
5. Publish the GTM container
6. Register custom dimensions in GA4 Admin so the event parameters appear in reports
7. Build an Explorations report in GA4 to actually view the data — adding the right dimensions, metrics, and filters

That's two Google products, roughly 10-15 configuration steps, and a day of waiting for data before you see anything useful. For a single site with a technical owner, this is manageable. For an agency managing 20 client sites, it's a significant time investment per site.

The Bigger Problem

Even with full GTM tracking in place, GA4 shows you the data as rows in a table: link URL, click count. If you have five links on a page that all point to /pricing/, GA4 can't easily distinguish between them unless you've added unique IDs or classes to each one and configured GTM to capture those attributes.

Google's old "Page Analytics" Chrome extension attempted to solve this by showing click percentages directly on the page. But it had a critical flaw — it showed the same click-through percentage for every link pointing to the same destination URL. Google deprecated the extension in 2017, and it hasn't been updated since 2019.

Method 2: MonsterInsights (Easier GA4, Same Limitations)

MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, with over 3 million active installs. It simplifies GA4 setup and adds some click tracking features.

What MonsterInsights tracks automatically:

• Outbound link clicks
• Affiliate link clicks (configurable by URL path prefix, e.g., /go/ or /recommend/)
• File download clicks
• mailto: and tel: link clicks

It also offers "Enhanced Link Attribution," which attempts to differentiate between multiple links pointing to the same URL by using element IDs. This helps with the "five links to /pricing/" problem, but only if your links have unique HTML IDs.

The limitation: MonsterInsights is a GA4 integration layer. It makes GA4 easier to configure, but the data still lives in Google Analytics. You're still looking at tabular reports, not a visual representation on your actual page. And internal link clicks beyond the categories above still require GTM or custom event setup.

Method 3: Heatmap Tools (Visual but External)

Heatmap tools like Microsoft Clarity (free) and Hotjar ($32+/month) take a different approach. (For a full comparison, see our Clarity vs Linkyy breakdown and Hotjar alternatives guide.) Instead of tracking specific events, they record where on the page visitors click, scroll, and move their cursor.

What you get:

• Color-gradient overlays showing click density across the page
• Session recordings showing individual visitor behavior
• Scroll depth visualization

The limitation for link tracking specifically: Traditional heatmaps are area-based. They show you that "a lot of people clicked in this general region of the page." But a click near a link isn't the same as a click on a link. If a visitor clicks the whitespace next to a button, an area-based heatmap records it the same way.

Heatmaps also run on external platforms. Clarity sends data to Microsoft's Azure servers. Hotjar stores everything on their infrastructure. For site owners concerned about data privacy or GDPR compliance, this adds complexity.

They're excellent tools for understanding general page behavior, but they don't give you a simple answer to "how many times was this specific link clicked?"

Method 4: Dedicated Link Click Tracking

What if instead of configuring GA4 events or interpreting area-based heatmaps, you could install a plugin that automatically tracks every link click and shows you the count right on the link itself?

That's the approach Linkyy takes.

How It Works

Automatic detection. Linkyy identifies every <a> tag on every page — navigation links, content links, CTAs, footer links, sidebar links, affiliate links. No manual tagging, no event configuration, no Tag Manager.

Click recording. For each click, Linkyy stores the page URL, the link's href and anchor text, a CSS selector path for precise element identification, the device type (desktop or mobile), and whether the visitor was logged in or anonymous. All data goes into your WordPress database — nothing is sent externally.

Visual overlay. Open any page on your site while logged in as an admin and toggle the Linkyy heatmap from the admin bar. Color-coded badges appear on every tracked link. More-clicked links get warmer colors; less-clicked links get cooler colors. You see the actual numbers at a glance, right on your live page.

Filtering. The overlay includes controls for narrowing the data by date range (7, 30, or 90 days), device type, or visitor status (logged-in vs. anonymous).

What This Looks Like in Practice

With link-level click data visible directly on your pages, you can answer questions that are nearly impossible with standard analytics:

• Is your sidebar CTA earning its screen space? If it shows 3 clicks in 30 days while the inline CTA got 180, the sidebar isn't working.
• Which navigation items do visitors actually use? If "Blog" gets 5x the clicks of "About," that tells you where visitor interest lies.
• Do mobile visitors behave differently from desktop? Toggle the device filter. You might find mobile visitors ignore your sidebar entirely — because it's below the fold on their screen.
• Are footer links worth maintaining? If 12 of your 15 footer links have zero clicks in 90 days, you can simplify without losing anything.
• Which content links attract attention? In a blog post with multiple links, see exactly which ones readers engage with and which they skip.

Comparing the Methods

Which Method Should You Use?

If you already use GA4 and just want outbound click data, enable Enhanced Measurement. It's already built in and requires no additional setup.

If you need full behavior analytics — session recordings, scroll maps, rage click detection — use Microsoft Clarity. It's free and comprehensive. The data lives on Microsoft's servers, but for general UX analysis it's hard to beat at zero cost.

If your primary question is "which links on this page do people click?" — and you want the answer displayed visually on your actual pages, stored in your own database, with no external services — that's what Linkyy is designed for.

These tools aren't mutually exclusive. A practical setup for many WordPress sites:

• GA4 for traffic sources, conversion funnels, and audience insights
• Clarity for session recordings and general behavior patterns
• Linkyy for link-specific click counts with a visual on-page overlay

Each answers a different question. GA4 tells you where visitors come from. Clarity shows you what they do on the page. Linkyy tells you which links they actually click.

Getting Started

Linkyy is free on WordPress.org for core click tracking with the admin dashboard — including device and visitor type filtering. Upgrade to Pro (from $29, one-time) for the visual heatmap overlay, data export, and role-based overlay access. No subscription, no external accounts, and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

If you've been trying to answer "which links get clicked on my site?" and the answer keeps requiring more tools, more configuration, and more time than it should — Linkyy is the focused plugin that makes it simple.