Name: PublishPress Shortlinks – Custom URLs for Posts and External Links – Share Previews for Draft Posts
Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Author: PublishPress

PublishPress Shortlinks is the best link manager available for WordPress. You can create custom links for your posts and external links. These links can have many extra features:

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Share posts in any status, even unpublished posts in Draft or Pending Review.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

How to use PublishPress Shortlinks

Custom URLs for your posts. Imagine you’re hosting a big event and have a page on your website with all the details. PublishPress Shortlinks allows to create a short, memorable link for the event, for example: https://publishpress.com/go/cool-party. You can track how many people click the link. You can set the link to expire after the event finishes. You can even download a QR code to share on brochures. Oh, because of the next feature, you can do all of this even if you’re selling event tickets on another website.
Custom URLs for external links. Imagine you run a website with toy reviews. You join affiliate programs and make money when people click on your links and buy tools. PublishPress Shortlinks allows to create a short, memorable link for each toy, for example: https://publishpress.com/go/cool-toy. You can track how many people click the link and get a full analytics report on those clicks.

PublishPress Shortlinks Pro

Upgrade to Shortlinks Pro
This plugin is the free version of the Shortlinks Pro plugin. The Pro version of PublishPress Revisions allows you to control access to editing shortlinks and viewing the click analytics. You can also show a custom message when someone is blocked from accessing a link. And you can import and export links. Click here to purchase the best WordPress link manager now!

Key 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 export 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
✅ 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 shortlinks are available from the Posts screen and the Post Edit screen.

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

Customize the slug for each shortlink

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 sharable 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 “Security” 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.

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. PublishPress Shortlinks is a great tool for marketers plugin for people who want to clean up their affiliate links.

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.