Since the Google URL Shortener service shut down in 2019, which lasted nearly nine years, netizens have been trying to find the best URL shortener site. Of course, as with most things, there is no one right answer, finding the best URL shortener depends on what you need and want from it.
There are simple, fast and free URL shortening apps; Focused on marketing and analytics with detailed dashboards and metrics; And even options where you can add a link or a "call-to-action" button via the link you want to share.
To help you find the best URL shortening services, we tested over 30 different options. Here are the 8 best services we found:
Best url shortener service:
Bitly: The best all-in-one link shortener in all respects.
(Rebrandly): The best URL shortener and branded link generation tool.
(TinyURL): Best URL shortener for fast and hidden use.
(BL.INK): The Best URL Shortener for Small Business Owners.
(Zapier): Best URL shortener to create short links automatically.
(Shorby): The best URL shortener for Instagram users.
(Short.io): Best URL shortener to send different links to different visitors.
(Sniply): The best URL shortener for adding Click-to-Call (CTA) buttons to the links you share.
url shortener features:
1. Shorten Link Length:
At its simplest, a URL shortener takes a long, unwieldy link and turns it into a shorter, easy-to-share link. For example, you can take a link like:
[http://www.example.com/my-blog/2021/my-super-awesome-blogpost-about-squirrels-and-why-they%27re-awesome-too]
And then convert it to a short link like:
[https://tinyurl.com/awesome-squirrels].
This enables you to provide a printable link on a business card, print advertisement, podcast interview, or any other situation where no one can click on a hyperlink.
2. Share on social media:
URL shorteners can also be useful for shortening longer links to fit character limits on social media and messaging apps, although many hyphens manage this aspect for you. Twitter, for example, automatically shortens any shared links through its own service called t.co, while the iMessage service for Apple devices hides any Links no matter how long or short behind a preview card that shows the contents of the target link. If you are only sending things to your friends, just consider shortening the URLs if you are using SMS in order not to pay extra.
3. Analytics and Click Tracking:
Another thing that most good URL shortening tools offer is some kind of analytics and click tracking. If you share someone else's website address with your audience, you won't be able to tell who clicked that link or how many times the link was clicked, because you're not the real owner of the site. However, if you use a URL shortener, and you share the shortened link with your audience, you will be able to collect data such as the number of clicks made on that shortened link, where it came from, and what devices the people who clicked on the link were using. In general, the more detailed and robust these analytics are, the higher the cost of the URL shortening service you use. Free URL shortening sites tend to offer primarily click tracking, while paid marketing services will collect as much data for you as possible — and also allow you to serve different URLs to people in different places or who use different devices.
4. Customize links:
All the URL shorteners mentioned in this article allow you to customize URL shorteners. This means that you can use different links in multiple ads or social media posts to compare click rates between ads or posts. Basic or free subscriptions may only allow you to change the last part of the URL (you get https://tinyurl.com/awesome-squirrels), while more business-focused services allow you to use a custom domain.
There are plenty of URL shortening services available, and in this article we've limited our research to stand-alone services that are easy to set up. There are versions of these tools that you can host on your site, such as: Polr and Yourls, which although practical, free and powerful, require a lot of technical knowledge to set up on your own site. There are also URL shorteners built into other apps that we haven't considered as well. For example, the popular link shortening service Ow.ly is fully integrated into Hootsuite's services, and most newsletter services contain some kind of URL shortening and tracking. Not that these services are not good, but they are not appropriate to mention in this article because they go beyond what most people need to shorten URLs.
.jpg)
0 Comments