Squad Affiliate installs like any other WordPress plugin. It needs WordPress 6.4 or later and PHP 8.1 or later, and it runs on any theme — Divi is optional and only unlocks the two native Divi 5 modules covered in The Divi 5 registration and dashboard modules.
From the dashboard#
- Go to Plugins → Add New.
- Search for Squad Affiliate.
- Click Install Now, then Activate.
From a ZIP#
Use this for the Pro build, which is not distributed through WordPress.org:
- Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
- Choose the ZIP and click Install Now.
- Click Activate Plugin.
Pro is an add-on, not a replacement: it installs beside the free build rather than in place of it, and it needs the free plugin active to do anything, since the free plugin is what actually runs your programme. Whether an install genuinely counts as “Pro” depends on two separate things being true at once — the Pro plugin files being active and a valid licence being attached to the site. A valid licence with the Pro plugin not installed doesn’t unlock Pro behaviour; it’s a state the free plugin can detect and use to prompt you to install the Pro files you’ve already paid for, rather than one that quietly enables anything.
What happens on activation#
Activation runs the plugin’s own upgrader, which builds every table the programme needs from scratch on a fresh site, or brings an existing site’s schema up to the current version — the same code path either way, since building from nothing and catching up from an older version are really the same operation viewed at different starting points. It also registers the /go/{slug} short-link rewrite rule and flushes permalinks immediately, so a short link works the moment the plugin is active rather than needing a manual visit to Settings → Permalinks to force WordPress to notice the new rule.
Referral and visit data lives in its own custom tables rather than in post meta, which is what keeps a programme doing real volume from slowing the site down: a hundred thousand visits is a hundred thousand narrow rows in a purpose-built table, not half a million wp_postmeta entries competing with the rest of your content for the same table WordPress core also reads from constantly.
Nothing is switched on yet#
A fresh install tracks nothing until you have an affiliate, and pays nothing until you build a payout batch. That is deliberate — activating a plugin should not start moving money, or start writing rows to a database table nobody asked it to write to yet. See Your first affiliate for the three ways an affiliate record actually comes into being.
Uninstalling#
Uninstalling removes nothing by default. Only when Settings → Advanced has “Delete all data on uninstall” ticked does deactivating and deleting the plugin drop its tables and clear its options and scheduled events — every table, both the current names and any older ones a very old install might still be using, so nothing is stranded behind if the rename between versions never ran on your site. Left unticked, deleting and reinstalling costs a programme nothing: its affiliates, referrals and payout history are exactly where they were.