10 Great Free Shortlink WordPress Plugins

The rise in popularity of social media services such as Twitter created a need for internet users to shorten their URLs. Many services became available to help you shorten URLs. URL shortening services have grown in importance with the expansion of the internet. Oftentimes we need to share URLs but the original address can be a bit too long. It’s still useful to provide short URLs to your readers though as permalinks can sometimes be quite long.

Depending on the length of your domain name, this method may still provide too long a URL for your needs. In this article, we take a look at some of the best free shortlinks plugins for WordPress. If you like this effort then don’t forget to take a look on other articles: Responsive Layout Free WordPress Themes 2015, Powerful Attorney and Lawyer WordPress Themes, Fingerprint Logo Design Examples and Free Isotope Widgets for WordPress.

1. Pretty Link Lite

Pretty Link enables you to shorten links using your own domain name (as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service)! In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Link is a killer plugin for people who want to clean up their affiliate links, track clicks from emails.

2. Google Shortlink by BestWebSoft

This plugin allows you to get short links from goo.gl service without leaving your site. It works in two modes: get short links by direct input and get short link for all external links on your site automatically. With this plugin you can replace all external links on your site with short links. The plugin also displays a click-through statistics for each short link.

3. Shortn.It

Shortn.It is a customizable, URL shortener that allows you to create shortened, unique, permalinks to any and every post imaginable. If you can post it, you can create a short link for it. Shortn. It automatically creates a short URL using a combination of lowercase, uppercase, and numeric characters (depending on the options you’ve set), but can be customized to be whatever URL safe string you wish.

4. WPU ShortLinks

Allows automatic url shortening of post links using WPU.IR Services using the API recently provided by WP-Parsi. Generate ShortLinks from Post Content URLs. Generate ShortLinks with Bulk Action. Request ShortLink With Admin Bar Shortcut. Adds very simple social sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to the end of your posts, based by Social Sharing by Danny.

5. Text My App

The most effective way to drive downloads for your mobile app. Admin places a shortcode on any page or post that enables a form to input a phone number. Reader submits phone number and gets a direct link to your app sent via SMS to their mobile device.

6. YOURLS Link Creator

Creates a YOURLS generated shortlink on demand or when saving posts. Optional custom keyword for link creation. Will retrieve existing URL if one has already been created. Click count appears on post menu. Available for standard posts and custom post types. Optional filter for wp_shortlink. Built in cron job will fetch updated click counts every hour.

7. URL Shortener

URL Shortener allows you to generate shortlinks for post/pages using URL Shorteners (e.g. Bit.ly, Su.pr and many others), with a few additional features. Action Hooks available for other plugins to utilize generated shortlinks. Choose to generate shortlinks using permalinks or the posts ID. Automatic generation of a Short URL/Shortlinks. Cached Shortlink – thus generated only once.

8. ClickMeter Link Shortener and Analytics

The ClickMeter Link Shortener and Analytics plugin‏ is dedicated to marketing Agencies, Affiliates, Publishers and Advertisers. This powerful all-in-one plugin allows you to immediately optimize your web-marketing actions. Using the advanced redirection options you will be able to redirect users where they yield the best conversion rates, be able to protect your affiliate codes and create safe links for SEO.

9. Laboratory by ColorLabs & Company

Laboratory is a set of modular WordPress extensions packed into one bundle. In this initial release, Laboratory comes with several modules such as a custom CSS/HTML editor, a shortlink generator, a custom login page editor, a dynamic menu generator, a responsive slideshow generator, a tabs widget, and the Socialcast that integrates your site with social networks.

10. WP Bitly

WP Bitly is the easiest way to replace the internally generated WordPress shortlinks with Bitly generated shortlinks. Even WPBeginner uses it (this isn’t an endorsement from them, I found the article almost by accident)! Provide WP Bitly with an authorization token (automatically generated for you by Bitly), tell it which post types you’d like to generate shortlinks for, and forget about it! WP Bitly does the rest for you.