Shorten your first link

The fastest way to learn Elido is to shorten a real URL — a campaign you're running this week, a piece of internal documentation, anything. The dashboard's + Create button is wired into the same flow whether you start from the home view, the links list, or the global Cmd-K palette.

Paste, customise, ship#

1. Click + Create (top of the dashboard) or press c from anywhere.
2. Paste the destination URL. We auto-detect missing https:// and add it for you.
3. (Optional) Type a custom slug. We reserve the slug as soon as you type — if it's already taken, the input turns red.
4. (Optional) Pick a tag, a folder, or a campaign. These all surface later in analytics and in the bulk export.
5. Press Enter or click Create. The short URL is on your clipboard.

The default short URL uses our shared free domain f.elido.me. Once you add a custom domain you can pick it from the domain dropdown at the top of the form.

What gets created#

Every short link is a row in our database with:

• A workspace owner (who pays for it).
• A destination URL, validated against our URL scanner before publishing.
• An optional slug — when you don't pick one we generate a 6-character base62 code.
• An expiry, password, click-cap, and geo-rules set (all optional, all editable later).

Test it#

Open the short URL in a private window. The redirect lands in under 20 milliseconds from EU regions; you'll see the original destination URL load.

While the page is loading, the click event is already on its way to ClickHouse via Redpanda. Refresh the link's analytics tab a few seconds later and you'll see your test click.

Bulk creation#

Need to make 50 at once? Use Tools → Bulk import with a CSV (destination,slug,tag columns). The wizard previews mistakes — bad URLs, duplicate slugs, oversized batches — before anything is written.

If something goes wrong mid-import, the importer is idempotent: re-run with the same file and it skips rows that already succeeded.