URLs make it easy for customers to find businesses on the vast web by providing direct access to their web pages or landing pages.
The problem arises when you have URLs that are too long. Social media sites like Twitter have character limits, so you can’t post a long URL and offer details about the link in a single post. This is where URL shortening becomes so valuable.
While it may be possible to build your own shortener, it certainly isn’t easy, even for software engineers. Tried-and-tested URL-shortening services like Bitly provide a quicker and easier way to condense your links.
Here, we’ll look at what goes into creating your own custom shortener and assess what it’s like to use proven solutions like Bitly.
What is a URL shortener?
A URL shortener is a tool that transforms lengthy and unwieldy URLs into more professional-looking links. Think of them as concealers for long URLs—they present you with more polished links without affecting the URLs’ functionality.
Short URLs facilitate seamless communication, as they’re easy to share and conveniently fit into social media posts, emails, and SMS. Their ease of sharing can increase your click-through rate (CTR), helping you generate leads.
They also allow seamless link management and tracking. URL shorteners like Bitly have integrated tracking tools that enable you to see the number of clicks your links receive, so you can change your strategy whenever necessary.
Well-established brands like The New York Times are already leveraging the power of short URLs. A quick look at the New York Times’ X page shows just how elegant short links are and how easy it is to share information through them.
The benefits of using a custom URL shortener
Numerous businesses are replacing long URLs with short ones. And while we don’t want to ask you to do something just because everyone else is, this is an exception.
A custom URL shortener is a must-have in your marketing strategy. Here’s why:
Brand consistency
Did you know the average person takes roughly 90 seconds to form an opinion about a brand? 90 seconds probably isn’t enough time for someone to try to figure out a long URL and decide if they want to follow it.
Custom URL shorteners allow you to maintain a consistent brand image across all marketing channels, making it easier for customers to recognize your links. Short URLs have a standardized structure. Take The New York Times’ confidential tip link, for example:
nyti.ms/2FVHq9v
The structure is domain name/link. This predictability facilitates instant brand recognition for customers, regardless of your chosen marketing medium. Like the New York Times, you can enhance brand consistency further by using a branded custom domain in your links.
Increased trust
Long URLs often look unprofessional and spammy. As such, they don’t evoke a lot of trust. This can be detrimental to your brand, as reduced customer trust translates to a lower CTR.
A custom URL shortener makes links appear cleaner and less cluttered, improving your chances of gaining your audience’s trust. The chances are even higher when you use branded links. Including your brand name or a custom keyword associated with your business in the link facilitates instant recognition and trust.
Enhanced analytics
A custom shortener increases your chances by providing analytics on the performance of your links. Services like Bitly offer data on the number of clicks and further break down the number by visitor demographics. This lets you identify your target market and what they’re most interested in. With this information, you can refine your strategy to improve marketing outcomes.
Factors to consider before building a URL shortener
Seeing these benefits, it’s tempting to want to create a URL-shortening tool.
But, building a URL shortener is more challenging than it sounds. You must learn about or hire someone who understands front-end languages like Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and back-end languages like Python, SQL, and Java to create your own shortener. And you have to deal with other factors like time, scalability, and reliability.
Understanding what goes into getting a URL shortener up and running can help you determine whether to build or opt for proven solutions. Here are some factors to consider before you start building.
Cost and time to market
“Time is money” is an old saying related to opportunity cost. There are always costs associated with developing technology, monetary and non-monetary. To build a link shortener, you have to allocate resources for a developer to write the code and set up the infrastructure to run the service.
We’ve heard from customers who have tried to develop their own internal shortener that their opportunity and monetary costs skyrocketed. The time spent developing, purchasing new infrastructure, and maintaining their service increased considerably over time. Engineers aren’t cheap, and the labor needed to update and maintain your own URL shortener will add up quickly.
A proven solution like Bitly has economies of scale. It has already invested in infrastructure and engineering, allowing it to work more efficiently at a lower cost. Bitly’s team of engineers, designers, and IT technicians is dedicated to giving customers the support they need while improving their URL-shortening solutions.
Features and support
Who doesn’t love additional features in a product? Whether it’s customer support or mobile apps, when you work with a business with dynamic features, you get more than just a single product.
Developing your own link-shortening solution may solve an initial use case, but as your requirements change, so will your need for additional features.
When building your own link shortener, it doesn’t take too much time to understand the many different features and tools top link-shortening solutions need to offer to succeed.
There are tons of amazing features built into a monthly package with a business like Bitly.
For example, features like QR Codes and the ability to change your URL destination make your links more versatile and give your brand more control. Similarly, the ability to track and measure multichannel campaigns gives marketers powerful insights into campaign performance by platform, making it easy to see where you’re getting the most engagement from.
But no matter how many bells and whistles a product offers, one of the most important factors is the team behind the product—which will consider customer feedback and release new features based on consumer needs.
Analytics and tracking
Today’s marketers use a variety of metrics to understand engagement with their content and communications and make data-driven decisions. To be a successful marketer, you will need analytics to show your metrics. But counting the number of clicks a link generates isn’t enough. Having accurate metrics is important to help customers flourish and grow online.
Having analytics is essential because bot crawlers regularly click on links, which can lead to grossly inflated metrics. For a more accurate view of your link engagement, you need to filter these bot clicks out. This, yet again, takes time and effort.
Top link management tools can help you track things like:
- Which website a click came from.
- The time of engagement.
- Geolocation information.
You can also leverage their tools to help make sense of engagement so you’re not left confused. For example, some platforms will allow you to group your links by channel or campaign and export data for deeper analysis.
Reliability
Reliability is essential to any business—it can make your product soar or sink. You may expect your custom-built software to work constantly and reliably, but often, there are unforeseen outages and bugs. Troubleshooting and fixing these issues cuts into company resources, such as engineering time.
Having dedicated engineers to troubleshoot any unexpected issues is an integral part of link management that you can’t afford to forego with your product.
A proven solution will have support and engineering teams to troubleshoot issues as they arise. When you’re knee-deep in launching a campaign, the last thing you want to worry about is finding resources to help fix unexpected problems.
Scalability
Creating a small number of shortened links and gathering basic metrics may be achievable. However, most brands expect their business and initiatives to grow. As new use cases for your solution arise, you may need to scale your link-shortening abilities. What was once a need for 100 links might become thousands or even millions of links. Without the infrastructure and support to meet the demand for more links, your product may be unsuccessful.
Bitly features several packages that can help your business transition to using more links as you grow to scale. For larger corporations, an enterprise-grade solution will support link generation at scale and programmatically retrieve link analytics.
Integrations
Platforms you use for your day-to-day may not integrate with your custom-built solution. Getting them to work together can take significant resources and time you may not have.
Ideally, the link shortener you use should enable you to easily connect with the other apps you already use rather than working across multiple platforms to get things done.
Security and compliance
As internal solutions are built, forgotten (yet important) factors often include security and compliance. Data and privacy regulations evolve constantly, and you must stay ahead of the curve to protect yourself. For example, is your newly developed shortener GDPR compliant? Are mechanisms in place to protect your links and the data?
A reliable solution will offer essential security features like spam filtering and blocking malicious links. It will also ensure their systems mitigate vulnerabilities by using third-party application penetration tests.
Compatibility
The internet ecosystem is constantly evolving. Browsers change and standards update. Inevitably, these changes may affect your links. Technical debt can be a concern since keeping up with every nuance of how your links may be impacted can be challenging.
A solid link-shortening solution will:
- Handle the edge cases and general internet “weirdness.”
- Be compatible with different types of browsers.
- Stay up to date with the latest internet standards.
Why is Bitly the best alternative to building your own URL shortener?
There’s a strong correlation between customer experiences and their buying decisions. The better a potential customer’s experience at all touchpoints in their buying journey, the more likely you are to convert that interest into a sale. Your links are a crucial touchpoint if you use them in your marketing campaigns. The easier they are to use, the better your audience’s experiences.
If you’re looking for information on ways to build your own URL shortener, chances are you already recognize the benefits of short links and are looking for a quick and ready-to-use solution. Unfortunately, creating your own shortener isn’t it, regardless of how easy a tutorial may make it seem.
With Bitly’s free URL shortener, you can start managing your links immediately. The platform requires minimal setup and offers immediate functionality, saving you from weeks, if not months, of tireless coding.
Let’s examine what else Bitly has to offer.
Ease of use and accessibility
URL shortening is simple with Bitly. The platform has a user-friendly interface that directs you throughout every step of the shortening process. To shorten your links, you only need to:
- Log in to or sign up for your free account.
- Tap Create new in the top-left corner.
- Select the Link option.
- Enter the original URL in the Destination URL box.
- To personalize your URL, type your preferred word or phrase in the Back-half box.
- Select Create to generate your shortened URL.
Easy, right? With every selection, you’ll receive a prompt on what to do next until you generate your new URL. Whether you’re tech-savvy or not, it’s easy to condense long links.
Advanced analytics
With Bitly, it’s about more than just creating short URLs for easier link management—the platform also provides detailed analytics.
Through the Bitly Connections Platform, you get click statistics that give you a clear visual of your engagement. You can identify the posts or campaigns your audience engages with the most so you can invest more in them. These insights also allow you to make well-informed decisions when creating future marketing campaigns.
Consistent performance
There’s nothing worse than having an unreliable solution, as it makes it hard for you to meet your needs. This could mean links not working as expected, limiting customer engagement.
Bitly is a reliable platform that seamlessly serves all businesses. It doesn’t matter whether you need a hundred or a million Bitly links—you’ll get them. Our engineering teams are always ready to troubleshoot and fix issues, so you never have to worry about last-minute inconveniences.
Branding options
Bitly is all about customization and control. You can use a custom domain on your short URLs to make your links more recognizable. Some people use their business names to reinforce brand identity, create a cohesive image across all platforms, and boost search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Others use custom keywords or terms their audience associates with to enhance recognizability and stand out from competitors. With Bitly, you can get as creative as you want when branding your links.
Ongoing support
At Bitly, we don’t just provide a URL-shortening solution and leave you in the dark. We’re constantly developing our systems to ensure you have the most up-to-date tools for enhanced convenience.
We also provide ongoing support to make sure our customers have support whenever needed. You can visit Bitly Support for tips on how to navigate Bitly or sign in to Zendesk using your Bitly account for further assistance.
Seamless URL management with Bitly: Your gateway to custom shortening success
If you’re looking for an easy, efficient custom URL shortener, you’ve come to the right place. While you can certainly build your own with the right skills, it’s a hassle, as the process is time- and resource-intensive.
Fortunately, Bitly is a time-tested solution that simplifies the URL-shortening process for brands like yours.
You can set up your account and start shortening your URLs almost immediately. And, to add icing on the cake, you get to track all your short links and compare their performance across different channels within the Bitly Connections Platform. You can also use the Bitly API to integrate with other tools for a more detailed visual.
Sign up for a Bitly account today for seamless URL management and enhanced link analytics!