Name: PublishPress Shortlinks – The Link Manager for WordPress
Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Author: PublishPress

PublishPress Shortlinks is the best link manager available for WordPress. With PublishPress Shortlinks, you can take any link on your website and perform useful actions like these:

Track who clicks on your links with detailed analytics.
Safely share posts in any status, even unpublished posts in Draft or Pending Review.
Make your URLs short and memorable.
Control who can visit your links with passwords, expiry dates, and access control.
Generate QR codes to easily share your links.

PublishPress Shortlinks Pro

Upgrade to Shortlinks Pro
This plugin is the free version of the Shortlinks Pro plugin. The Pro version of PublishPress Shortlinks allows you to control access to editing shortlinks and viewing click analytics. You can also create dynamic redirects, schedule Link Health email digests, and customize the message shown when someone is blocked from accessing a link. Click here to purchase the best WordPress link manager now!

Key Link Management Features in PublishPress Shortlinks

✅ Automatically create shortlinks for your posts
✅ Use your own website domain for shortlinks
✅ Customize the slug for each shortlink
✅ Share shortlinks for posts in any status
✅ Add password protection to your shortlinks
✅ Automatically expire your shortlinks on a specific date
✅ Choose from 301, 302, and 307 redirects
✅ Track who is clicking your shortlinks with analytics
✅ Generate a QR code for each shortlink to allow easy sharing
✅ Automatically add links to keywords
✅ Cloak your affiliate links

Automatically create shortlinks for your posts

PublishPress Shortlinks will automatically generate links for all your posts and pages. This makes it really easy to have shareable links for content. These URLs are available from the Posts screen and the Post Edit screen.

Get started with PublishPress Shortlinks.

Use your own website domain for shortlinks

There’s no need to use an external service to build and track your links. With PublishPress Shortlinks, all your custom URLs use your own domain name. To avoid conflicts with any regular URLs on your site, there’s also a folder which is set to “go” by default. This means that your custom URLs will look like this: https://example.com/go/shortlinks. Every post has its own URL. By default, the final part of the URL will be a unique combination of 5 characters, so your shortlink will look like this: https://example.com/go/8vi3n. However, you can customize the slug so it looks like this: https://example.com/go/shortlinks.

Share shortlinks for posts in any status

When you’re writing a draft post, do you sometimes need to share it with someone who doesn’t have access to your site? PublishPress Shortlinks is the answer. PublishPress Shortlinks allows you to share posts before you make them public. If you’ve written a draft of a post, you can share a preview with other people. You can protect these links by combining this with other features, including password protection and automatic expiry of links. This feature is similar to the Public Post Preview plugin, but with more features and customizable features.

More on shortlinks for unpublished posts.

Add password protection to your shortlinks

Edit a shortlink and go to the “Security” tab. You’ll be able to create a password for your shareable links. Nobody will be able to access the post via your shortlink unless they know the password.

Automatically expire your shortlinks on a specific date

Edit a shortlink and go to the “Scheduling” tab. You’ll be able to choose an expiration date for your shortlink. Anyone trying to visit your link after the expiration date will see the message, “This link is expired.”

Choose from 301, 302, and 307 redirects

Edit a shortlink and go to the “Redirection” tab. You can choose what kind of redirect is used for each link. 301 (Permanent) redirects are used to tell search engines that a requested URL has been permanently moved to another URL. If you’re confident that your target URL will never change, then use this redirect type. 302 and 307 (Temporary) redirects tell search engines that the requested URL has been moved temporarily, but will be back eventually.

Track who is clicking your shortlinks with analytics

PublishPress Shortlinks has a Logs feature that records everyone who clicks your links. These logs are then turned into analytics charts so you can see how popular each shortlink is.

Generate a QR code for each shortlink to allow easy sharing

PublishPress Shortlinks will automatically create a QR code for each link. This makes it easy to download and share the QR code so people can visit your URL. This is great for advertisements, brochures, PDFs, restaurant menus, or anywhere you want to use a QR code.

Automatically add links to keywords

You can automatically add links to keywords in your post. For example, every time “WordPress” appears in your posts, you can link it to WordPress.org.

Cloak affiliate links

PublishPress Shortlinks is ideal for websites that have affiliate links in posts. You can manage, clean up, brand, and track your links. It’s a great tool for cloaking affiliate links, and for marketers who want to clean up and brand the links they share.

Find and fix your broken links

PublishPress Shortlinks scans your links and reports the ones that no longer work. The Link Health screen lists every broken destination it finds, with a search box for working through a long list.

The scan can run on a schedule rather than only when you ask for it, and it can email you a digest of what it found, so a link that dies quietly on an old post does not stay dead for months.

Reports on how your links are performing

The Reports screen turns your click data into a summary you can read at a glance, alongside the per-link Analytics screen.

Choose which post types get shortlinks

By default every post and page can have a shortlink. The post type selector lets you narrow that to the content where links matter, so a site with a dozen custom post types is not generating links nobody will use.

Moving from another shortlink plugin

PublishPress Shortlinks detects other link plugins on your site and offers to bring your existing links across, so switching does not mean rebuilding your links by hand or breaking the ones already shared.

See where your clicks come from

As well as recording each click, the analytics track referrer domains, so you can tell a link shared on a newsletter apart from the same link shared on social media.

Add a shortlink while you write

There is a link tool in the block editor, so a shortlink can be created and inserted without leaving the post you are writing. There is also a keyboard shortcut, below.

Create Shortlinks via Keyboard Shortcuts

Click Ctrl/Cmd + / anywhere in the WordPress admin area to instantly create shortlinks.

Join PublishPress and get the Pro plugins

The Pro versions of the PublishPress plugins are well worth your investment. The Pro versions have extra features and faster support. Click here to join PublishPress.

Join PublishPress and you’ll get access to these Pro plugins:

PublishPress Authors Pro allows you to add multiple authors and guest authors to WordPress posts.
PublishPress Blocks Pro has everything you need to build professional websites with the WordPress block editor.
PublishPress Capabilities Pro is the plugin to manage your WordPress user roles, permissions, and capabilities.
PublishPress Checklists Pro enables you to define tasks that must be completed before content is published.
PublishPress Future Pro is the plugin for scheduling changes to your posts.
PublishPress Permissions Pro is the plugin for restricted content and advanced WordPress permissions.
PublishPress Planner Pro is the plugin for managing and scheduling WordPress content.
PublishPress Revisions Pro allows you to update your published pages with teamwork and precision.
PublishPress Series Pro enables you to group content together into a series.
PublishPress Shortlinks Pro allows you to create custom URLs for your posts and external links.
PublishPress Statuses Pro enables you to create additional publishing steps for your posts.

Together, these plugins are a suite of powerful publishing tools for WordPress. If you need to create a professional workflow in WordPress, with moderation, revisions, permissions and more, then you should try PublishPress.

Bug Reports

Bug reports for PublishPress Shortlinks are welcomed in our repository on GitHub. Please note that GitHub is not a support forum, and that issues that aren’t properly qualified as bugs will be closed.

[1.10.1] – 16 September, 2026

Fixed: Preserve legacy shortlink URLs and normalize source prefixes during migration, #407
Update: Add Copy Action to the Shortlinks List, #411
Update: Add Per-User Favorites for Shortlinks, #412

[1.10.0] – 08 September, 2026

Update: Move Activation and Expiration to a separate tab, #377
Update: Referrer Domains field, #379
Update: Update WP “Requires at least” and “Requires PHP” fields in readme header, #391
Update: Update the metabox to be ready for WordPress visual revisions, #393
Update: Announce asynchronous admin updates, #387
Improve: Improve accessibility of admin form controls, #384
Improve: Improve QR code accessibility, #388
Improve: Improve accessibility of admin semantics, #390
Fixed: Remove extra spaces in settings, #378
Fixed: Some settings tab have an issue with the left sidebar menu, #392
Security: Harden CSV import upload validation, #397
Security: Harden WPDK privileged writes, #398

[1.9.0] – 04 August, 2026

Fixed: License tab does not reflect proper license status on save, #354
Fixed: Metabox design issue in WordPress 7.1, #363
Fixed: This plugin can be deleted, #366
Update: Consistency between Analytics and Reports screens, #355
Update: Scheduled Link Health and email digest, #357
Update: Dynamic redirect engine, #358
Update: Improve Shortlinks Expiration, #360

The full changelog can be found on GitHub.