Besides the ability to easily share lengthy links and the legit fact that you can track your short links easily, another advantage of using a personalized short domain is being able to reinforce your brand. Each time that you share a link with your friends or followers, you remind them of the domain name of your site, which is hugely instrumental in the passive promotion of your business.
This article will show you can easily set up your personalized short links with WordPress.
Setting Up Your Personal Short Links With Bit.ly
The easiest method to set up personal short links is via Bit.ly. To make that work, you will have to follow the steps mentioned below:
Registering your custom short domain: Go to Domainr.com and select a shortened version of your domain name. You will need to show some creativity with this, depending on your primary domain name. A few suggestions would include removing the vowels or using the first couple of letters of every word only in your regular domain name for creating a shortened URL that is memorable.
Signing up for Bit.ly account: If you have not signed up for your Bit.ly account, you must go and sign up for a Bit.ly account. Continue by verifying your email address.
Adding your short domain to Bit.ly: Click on Settings under your profile name and select the Advanced option. Click on "Activate a Branded Short Domain" for personal use. Type in your domain name on the next screen and click on Add.
Pointing your custom short domain to Bit.ly: Whatever service you go to to register your domain, create an A Record in your DNS settings leading to Bit.ly’s IP address – 69.58.188.49. You can usually find that setting in either DNS Zone File or Advanced DNS Settings, depending on your registrar. You will have to wait for the change to propagate, which may take up to 48 hours.
Installing the WP Bit.ly plugin: You need to install and activate the WP Bit.ly plugin to avoid going to Bit.ly every time you want to use your new short domain. The plugin will be asking you to get the OAuth token for your Bit.ly account, after which your personalized short domain will be ready to use from WordPress directly whenever you publish a new post.
Use Custom Short Links With Pretty Link Lite/Pro: Pretty Link comes with free and premium versions, but the free version is more than enough to create shorter links. You cannot set up a branded short domain with this plugin. But you can surely customize how the links look. You can set it to be www.myblog.com/mypost instead of having a link like www.myblog.com/this-is-the-title-of-my-post. WordPress already allows you to do this on the post editor screen, but the main difference is that Pretty Links will enable you to track and monitor those short links in a variety of ways. Using the plugin is easy. Still if you have any doubts than you may consult a WordPress developer anytime. After you have installed and activated it, you can start by adding a new link. With Pretty Link Lite, you can do the following tasks:
Tracking the number of hits per Link
Tracking number of unique hits per Link
Generating regular charts and reports
Organizing links into groups
Turning following on and off
Creating nofollow/noindex links
If you need more features, you can go for an upgrade to Pretty Link Pro anytime.
Setting up personalized short links with YOURLS
YOURLS denotes “Your Own URL Shortener." It is a collection of PHP scripts that you have to install on your hosting server.
If you wish to exercise complete control over your shortened links, then this last option is for you. It is a slightly more complicated option than the other two because it involves coming aboard in coding, but the advantage is that you are not dependent on a third party service.
Just like with Bit.ly, you have to purchase a short domain and then use these scripts to create a private URL shortening service that uses that domain name. Following is the process of setting it up.
- Downloading YOURLS :- Download the latest version of YOURLS; unzip it and go to the user/config-sample.php. Rename it to config.php, save it to the same folder, and then open it with your preferred text editor.
- Configuring YOURLS settings :- You will have to change a few lines. Finally, scroll down till you see find this line: $yourls_user_passwords = array(Change the username and password here, for username1 to match your username and password. The remaining settings are optional and pretty self-explanatory.
- Creating a database :- Log in to your web hosting account and go to the “MySQL Database” under the Databases column. Create a database with the name you mentioned in the config.php file and also the user and password and assign it to the newly created database.
- Uploading the files to your hosting account :- Upload all your files and folders in the same structure to the root folder of your web hosting account.
- Finish your installation :- Now, load a new browser tab and type in: http://yoursite.com/admin/install.php but replace yoursite.com with your domain name. If you see that everything is set up correctly, you will find the admin screen asking you to finish the installation.
- Installing the Better YOURLS Plugin :- Now, download and install the Better YOURLS plugin, which works mostly like the WP Bit.ly plugin, but the primary difference is this is designed to work with your new YOURLS URL shortener.
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