Shortening a URL takes a second. The harder part starts later, when the link is printed on a flyer, pasted into forty emails and quoted in a slide deck, and somebody asks which of those places actually sent people. Link management is the set of habits and tools that lets you answer that, and change your mind afterwards.
A short link is a redirect you control
Every short link has two halves: the address people see and the destination it sends them to. Because the redirect happens on your side, the destination stays editable. If the campaign page moves, you update the link once and every copy of it, in every inbox and on every poster, follows.
That is the first reason to shorten links you care about, and it has nothing to do with length. A long URL in a PDF is frozen the day you export it. A short link is not.
The four jobs of link management
1. Make links readable
On paid plans you can choose the back-half yourself, so lnki.io/summer-sale replaces a random code. A readable link tells people where they are going before they click, and it is far easier to say out loud or type from a poster.
2. Keep them findable
Once a workspace holds hundreds of links, search alone is not enough. Lnki gives you two tools that do different jobs: a link lives in one folder, and can carry up to ten tags. Folders answer where something belongs; tags answer what it has in common with links elsewhere. Folders or tags? goes through a scheme that holds up.
3. Know what happened
Each link records its clicks, and the Analytics page breaks them down by time, audience and source. Lnki counts people rather than raw requests: bots, link previews and accidental double taps are set aside and reported separately. How Lnki counts a click explains exactly what is and is not counted.
4. Stay in control
Links can be archived, given an expiry date, or put behind a password of eight characters or more. A QR code made from a link inherits all of that, because the code only ever points at the short link.
When you need more than the basics
- Your own domain. Links on
go.yourbrand.comcarry your name instead of ours. You add one DNS record and the SSL certificate is issued for you. - Campaign tagging. Campaigns & UTM builds one tagged link per channel, so your analytics tool can tell the newsletter from the social post.
- Bulk work. Import links from the clipboard, a CSV or an Excel file instead of creating them one by one.
- Automation. On the Business plan the API creates and updates links from your own systems, and webhooks tell those systems when something happens.
Where to go next
If you have not made a link yet, the first tutorial takes about three minutes. If you already have a spreadsheet of URLs, start with importing links in bulk instead.
