10 Free URL Shortener WordPress Plugins

Looking for something similar to bitly? Here are other URL shortener plugins that are free and easily compatible in to your WordPress site. The rise in popularity of social media services such as Twitter created a need for internet users to shorten their URLs. Many services became available to help you shorten URLs such as TinyURL, Goo.gl and Bitly.

There is perhaps less of a need to shorten URL’s yourself now as most services have their own URL shortening service built in. For example, Twitter uses t.co for shortening links whilst StumbleUpon uses Su.pr. It’s still useful to provide short URLs to your readers though as permalinks can sometimes be quite long. Plus, short URL’s are preferred when sending a link to friends in a text message.

Get Short Links Fast

The quickest and easiest way of providing a shortlink is by clicking the ‘Get Shortlink’ button in your post editor. The button is placed right next to your permalink. When you click the button WordPress gives you a short URL for your post or page such as http://www.yoursite.com/?p=12345

Depending on the length of your domain name, this method may still provide too long a URL for your needs. Today I will be showing you 7 free plugins for WordPress that let you shorten the URLs of your posts and pages. I hope you find the list useful 🙂

* As always, all plugins were tested on a test blog for the purpose of this article.

1. la petite url

A fantastic plugin that lets you shorten URLs using your own domain or another. You can add a prefix to all links and decide on how many characters are used in the URLs. The URLs can be generated using a combination of lowercase letters, uppercase letters and numbers.

la petite url: Info & Download

2. URL Shortener

Allows you to shorten URLs using a wide variety of services such as TinyURL, Snipr and Bitly.

URL Shortener: Info | Download

3. Simple URL Shortener

An easy to use URL shortener that can work with over 100 URL shortening services. To shorten the link you simply need to call the simple_url_shortener function in your post, page or template with the link you want to shorten and the service you want to use. An example of the code you use is shown below:

Simple URL Shortener: Info | Download

4. Kael.me URL Shortener

Allows you to generate short URLs using your own domain name. You can separate the code from your domain using a dash, underscore, plus or exclamation mark. You can redirect links using a temporary 307 redirect or a permanent 301. The plugin tracks the number of clicks of each shortened link too.

Kael.me URL Shortener: Info & Download

5. WP.me

Used by millions of WordPress.com users, WP.me is the official URL shortener of WordPress. The WP.me module is part of the Jetpack a series of modules. If you are only looking to add the WP.me shorten service to your site I recommend installing Jetpack Lite instead as the only two modules included are WordPress.com stats and WP.me.

Once you have installed Jetpack the ‘Get Shortlink’ button will now generate a WP.me URL for your post and pages.

WP.me: Info & Download

6. Self Shortener

Create short URLs on your own WordPress website. Allows you to determine the length of the generated URL.

Self Shortener: Info & Download

7. YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter

Uses the YOURLS service to generate short URLs on your blog. Once you have published a new post or page the plugin will generate a short URL for you and then automatically tweet the link on your Twitter account.

YOURLS: Info & Download

8. WP to Twitter

Another plugin that shortens URLs whenever a post or page is published and then tweets the link for you. You can shorten links using Su.pr, Bit.ly, YOURLS or WordPress. You can also choose not to shorten the URL before tweeting if you want.

WP to Twitter: Info & Download