Recently an email subscriber complained that I had sent out a newsletter containing links shortened via a URL shortner service.
There are a couple of reasons I did this. First if a URL is too long email programs break the links by wrapping. This means I get a lot of people saying the links don’t work. The second reason is in the past Aweber’s built-in click tracking shortened URLs have broken also when the URL contained non-standard stuff.
Of course the problem when people see a URL-shortened link is they don’t know if they can trust it. I have three solutions, and they are all easy to implement on WordPress.
- Shrink your URLs down as far as they will go – Instead of www.somedomain.com/category/year/month/day/post use a URL scheme like mydomain.com/post
- Use a redirect plugin such as gocodes to turn a long fancy URL into something like http://chrisg.com/recommends/hosting
- WordPress already provide you with pre-shortened URLs, you just need to know where to find them! :)
Waaah?
Yes, indeed. You already have access to short URLs without changing or adding anything.
If you go into your control panel and look at editing your post, you will see an article ID. Simply use that instead of the prettier and friendlier URL. Eg. http://f1ftw.com/?p=28 goes to http://f1ftw.com/fantasy-f1/vettel-takes-china/ (of course it helps when your domain is 5 characters not including the TLD).
