Regular website links which are usually long have become so old fashioned owing to their spammy look. Even Twitter character limit of 140 has made people get creative on how they share a link. That is why URL shorteners have gained ground because they reduce the number of characters in a link.
The are many options available for shortening web links and some of them even provide additional features such as bookmarking as well as being able to monitor your clicks.
Here are the 5 most popular URL shorteners and they are in no particular order. These are some of the most used in the market and they offer features ranging from bookmarking, stats and tracking.
Bitly
Bitly is the most widely used URL shortening tool right now and it provides you with features that enables you to integrate it with loads of other web services as well as third party apps like TweetDeck and Twitterfeed. Another advantage of using Bitly is that you can track statistics such as how many clicks your shortened links received. You can also bookmark and organize your links on a dashboard provided on their website.
Goo.gl
Goo.gl is Google’s own official URL shortener. Though it is one of the new URL shorteners on the market, it is becoming a popular choice for internet users. It is straight forward because it gets the work done as quickly as possible. When you use it shorten your link, The goo.gl link and the long URL will be displayed and you also get to see how many clicks it has received.
Ow.ly
Ow.ly is another popular URL shortener, created by social media app called HootSuite. With Ow.ly, you can shorten your links asap, even though it requires that you enter a CAPTCHA code. In addition to its basic function, you share files, images and videos of different formats. It can also be used in conjuction with HootSuite through its dashboard.
TunyURL.com
TinyURL was one of the first URL shorteners and was also widely used in the past and even though people still use it, it adds more characters compared to others. But with Tiny URL, you can customize the letters and numbers in a short link. For example, a link such as https://tinyurl.com/y8jaxnoj can be customized to https://tinyurl.com/webgritty. This is cool feature because it makes your link easy to remember.
Buff.ly
Buff.ly is Buffer’s own URL shortener just like Hootsuite’s Ow.ly and it was made for you to shorten your links only within their platform. This means that you can’t use their service as a standalone service like Owly.