Looking for Wordpress Plugins to shorten urls? Many people would like to share the URLs of web pages or an article which they find interesting with their friends. But most of the URL’s are very long and these days micro-blogging is the hot trend which allows users to post messages only up to 140 characters. Due to this, many of the URL’s will be chopped off at the end making it useless to share them. So, to solve this problem URL shortening is a feasible solution.
There are plugins available for WordPress that allow you to shorten the lengthy URLs and enable you to count the number of clicks for each shorten URL. WordPress plugins are very easy to install and use. You can include a short URL for every post in your WordPress blog so that users can easily share posts with others right from your blog.
Wordpress Url Shortening Plugins
Here-in are the five handy WordPress plugins for shortening URL’s.
1. Short URL Plug-in – This WordPress plug-in allows you to shorten the long URL’s easily and it even enables you to keep track of the short URL’s so that you can know how many times each short URL has been clicked. This feature is really useful to track downloads and other links in your blog. If you wish to reset the counter you can click on the ‘clear all’ button to zero the counter. It includes pagination of links, easier setup of htaccess (permalinks) and allows administrators to pass variables to their redirects.
2. YOURLS WordPress plug-in – This is a URL shorting service that lets you to shorten the long URL’s on your post and tweet them to the Twitter site automatically. You can configure the settings according to your needs such that you can set it to tweet when you have added a new post or page on your blog. It will send a Tweet with the title of the post and a shortened URL which will redirect to your post. It is very simple to install and works automatically after the initial configuration of the plug-in. It is also compatible with other URL shorting services like the Tinyurl.com, bit.ly is.gd, tr.im etc.
3. WP-Chunk – This WordPress plug-in will shorten the URL’s that are present in the comments field. Most of the visitors would like to add or share some other information related to the post in the comments. In that case, they just add the URL of the page that contains the related information. This WordPress plug-in will help shorten the URL’s present in the comments field so that you do not have problem when editing the comments or your blog will look just tidy with all the short URLs.
4. Pretty Link – This is another handy WordPress plug-in that allows you to shorten any web page URL’s. It will help you to track the hit count of the shortened URL’s, where each hit came from, the browser used, OS and the host. One cool feature of this plug-in is that: you can use your own domain name to shorten the URL’s.
5. Shorter Links – This WordPress plug-in will generate shorter URL of the posts on your blog so that users can easily post the link on any of the web services like Twitter, friendfeed, share it etc., When you save the post to WordPress, the shorter link that is generated can be edited into more meaningful characters. You can further configure the plug-in using the provided settings.