Affiliates get a front-end dashboard: their referral link and coupon code, visits and conversion stats, a referral list, earnings and payout history, creatives to download, the leaderboard if you enabled it, and their own profile and payout preferences.
Putting it on a page#
Add the [squad_affiliate_dashboard] shortcode to any page, or use the Divi 5 Dashboard module. The same underlying screen answers three more shortcodes for narrower jobs — [squad_affiliate_login] for a sign-in form on its own, [squad_affiliate_register] for the application form on its own (an alias kept for the older name), and [squad_affiliate_apply], its current name. Logged-out visitors on the full dashboard see a login or registration prompt rather than an empty screen — which matters, because the portal URL is the one link affiliates bookmark and they will arrive at it logged out as often as not.
Whose brand it wears#
The portal carries your site’s name, not this plugin’s branding. The person using it has a relationship with your programme, not with us.
What affiliates can see and change#
The self-service profile endpoint lets an affiliate update their own profile fields and payout details, and it lets them set or clear their own vanity slug — the readable name behind ?ref=jane, subject to the same validation everyone’s slug is checked against: at least 3 characters, letters, numbers and single hyphens only, never all-digits (that would collide with a numeric affiliate ID), and not one of a short reserved list (admin, login, ref, register, support and a handful of others an affiliate shouldn’t be able to impersonate). A slug that’s already taken by someone else is refused with a clear reason rather than silently reassigned.
Changing a slug is real, and it isn’t reversible for whoever already has the old one written down. There’s no lock that prevents an affiliate from changing a slug that already has traffic — they can change it any time the new value passes validation — but the old slug stops resolving to anything the moment it’s replaced, because the affiliate row only ever holds one slug at a time. A business card or a bio link printed with the old name breaks the instant the affiliate types a new one into their profile; it isn’t grandfathered.
What an affiliate cannot change is their own commission rate, or anything that would alter what they’re owed — that stays entirely an admin decision, set on the affiliate’s record, their group, or a commission rule.
Keeping it fast#
The portal reads from the same custom tables the admin does and paginates everything — the “my referrals” list, the click history, the payout history. Summary totals shown on the dashboard (lifetime earnings, unpaid balance) come from an aggregate query over the affiliate’s whole history, not from summing whatever page of results happens to be showing, which matters specifically for the affiliates who earn the most: summing a page would understate exactly their totals, since their real history is longer than one page. An affiliate with fifty thousand visits gets the same page speed as one with fifty.