How to Shorten a URL: Phone, Excel, YouTube and More

To shorten a URL, paste the long link into a URL shortener, change the ending to something readable if you want, and copy the short link it hands back. It takes about ten seconds, costs nothing for a basic link, and works the same for one address or a thousand. That's the whole job. Everything below is about doing it from wherever you happen to be, an iPhone, an Android phone, an Excel sheet, and for the links people shorten most: YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Google Drive and Google Maps.

There is a real difference between grabbing an anonymous short URL and making a short link you control. A free anonymous link works, but you can't edit it, you barely see who clicked, and you're renting space on someone else's domain. A branded short link on your own domain can be edited and measured, and it carries your name into every share. Each section below answers its own question first, so jump to the one you came for.

If the format is new to you, what a URL shortener actually is sets the foundation, and the end-to-end UTM tracking guide shows where a shortened link fits in a real campaign.

Which Way to Shorten a Link Fits Your Situation

Before the details, the short map. Pick the row that matches where the long link is right now and how many of them you have.

The rest of the page follows that order: the basic flow and the free-or-branded choice first, then phones, then spreadsheets, then the six platforms.

The Fastest Way to Shorten a URL

Every shortener follows the same three moves. Learn them once and the tool barely matters.

• Paste the long URL. Copy the address from the browser bar and drop it into the shortener's input box. A good tool takes the full link, query parameters and all, without you trimming anything.
• Customize the ending (optional). Replace the random characters with a readable slug: /spring-sale reads better than /aZ9x2, and it's the step that turns a generic short URL into something a person can remember.
• Copy the short link. The tool returns your shortened URL, ready for a post, an email, a slide or a printed flyer.

None of this needs you to understand the redirect behind it. If you're curious anyway, the under-the-hood post is in the list at the bottom.

Free vs Branded: What You Trade When You Shorten a Link

The ten-second version gives you a working link. It doesn't give you ownership, and most people make this choice without noticing they had one.

A free anonymous short link is fine for a throwaway, a one-off share in a chat. It has three quiet costs. You can't change the destination later, so a typo in the target is permanent. You see little about who clicked. And the link lives on the shortener's domain, so a stranger's brand sits between you and your audience, and the link survives only as long as that company's retention policy allows. Our ranking of free URL shorteners breaks down what each one withholds.

A branded short link flips all three. It sits on a custom domain you control, so it reads go.yourbrand.com/offer. You can repoint it without changing the link. And the click data is yours. The cost is small: you sign up, and on most platforms that needs a paid tier. For anything customer-facing it wins on trust alone, and you'll see the same argument come back in almost every platform section further down.

How to make a branded (custom) short link

A branded short link is a short link on your own domain with an ending you chose. Setup is a one-time job; after it, every link you create inherits the domain.

Connect a domain or subdomain first. Most teams use go. or l. so it stays separate from the main site. You add the DNS record the shortener gives you, it issues a TLS certificate, and it goes live. The full walkthrough, with the exact records and the answer to "what is a custom back-half", is in setting up branded short links. After that, creating a link is the same three steps, except the address is yours and you type the ending yourself.

That readable ending has a name: a vanity URL. It's the format that works in print, on stage, and anywhere a link has to be typed rather than tapped. If you want one link to send people to different places by country, device or language, that's what smart links do, with rules running on the same short link before it resolves.

How to Shorten a URL on Your Phone

Neither iOS nor Android ships a URL shortener. Safari's and Chrome's share sheets copy the full address and stop there. What both systems do have is a way to put your own action into the share sheet, and that's the whole trick: once it's set up, shortening is Share, tap, paste.

The quick fallback works on any phone with no setup at all. Load the shortener's website in the browser, paste, copy the result, switch back. If you shorten a link once a month, that's genuinely the right answer, and nothing below is worth building. If you do it every week, the share-sheet route pays back its few minutes of setup inside a fortnight.

Both phone routes below talk to a shortener's API, so they need a key. On Elido, API access is part of the free plan; create a workspace API key, which is bound to one workspace, so the request can leave out the workspace and the domain and the link lands on your default short domain. The request shape matches the API and SDK quickstart.

If you use the Elido app for iOS or Android, it registers itself as a share target: share a page to it and it opens its shorten screen with the URL already filled in. The two routes below get you the same result with nothing installed beyond what the phone already has, which is why they're worth knowing.

On iPhone: a four-action Shortcut

The Shortcuts app can call any HTTP API and put the answer on your clipboard. In Shortcuts, tap the plus, and add these four actions in order.

1. Receive URLs. In the Shortcut's details panel, turn on Show in Share Sheet and set the accepted input to URLs only. Leave it on Anything and the Shortcut shows up when you share a photo.
2. Get Contents of URL. Point it at https://api.elido.app/v1/links, then expand the options and set them as shown below.
3. Get Dictionary Value, key short_url, from the output of step 2. Shortcuts has already parsed the JSON, so there's nothing to decode.
4. Copy to Clipboard. Add Show Notification after it, or the Shortcut runs silently and you're never quite sure it worked.

The settings for step 2, written out:

URL:           https://api.elido.app/v1/links
Method:        POST
Headers:       Authorization = Bearer YOUR_API_KEY
               Content-Type  = application/json
Request Body:  JSON
               destination_url = Shortcut Input
               slug            = (optional) a Text field you fill in

Name the Shortcut something short, because the name is what you tap in the Share sheet and what you say to Siri. Then open a page in Safari, press Share, tap the Shortcut, and paste. It works from anything that offers a Share sheet: Mail, Notes, third-party browsers, most reader apps. Apple's Shortcuts user guide covers the Share sheet settings in more detail.

The gotcha is the Method row. Get Contents of URL defaults to GET, the row is easy to scroll past, and the API answers with an error that Shortcuts reports as something unhelpful. The second most common miss is Request Body left on Form instead of JSON, which sends a format the API can't read the destination from. If both are right and it still fails, add a Quick Look action straight after Get Contents of URL: it shows the raw response, and the error message usually names the field it objected to.

Two refinements once the basic version runs. Put a Text action before the request that appends your campaign parameters to the Shortcut Input, so links shared from the phone carry the same tags as the ones built at a desk; UTM naming conventions has a scheme that survives a team. And treat the Shortcut as a credential, because the key lives inside it. Don't publish it to a shared iCloud link, and if a colleague wants it, send the recipe so they paste their own key.

On Android: share sheet, browser or automation

Android gives you three routes, and the share sheet is the one most people want. From any page, tap Share (in Chrome it's under the three-dot menu), and pick a shortener app from the sheet. Android's share system hands the URL to whichever app registered for links, so a shortener appears next to Messages and Gmail.

Steps for the share-sheet route:

1. Install a shortener app that registers as a share target, and open it once so it signs in. Some launchers hide targets until the app's first run.
2. Share a page and pick the shortener. If your phone's share sheet offers Pin on a long-press (it depends on the Android version and the manufacturer), pin it, because unpinned targets drift down the list as the sheet reorders by predicted use.
3. Set the slug and campaign tags on the create screen before you confirm. Tags applied at creation are consistent; tags someone means to add later from a laptop mostly never happen.

The browser route is the same as on iPhone: open the shortener's site, paste, copy. Nothing to install, works on a borrowed phone.

The automation route is where Android gets interesting. There's no first-party Shortcuts app, but apps like HTTP Shortcuts or Tasker register as share targets and call an API directly, so you can build exactly the pipeline the iPhone section describes: a POST to https://api.elido.app/v1/links, an Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY header, a JSON body with destination_url set to the shared text, and a step that reads short_url from the response and copies it.

The Android gotcha is the clipboard. Newer Android versions restrict clipboard access from background contexts, so an automation that copies without showing anything can fail silently and leave you pasting whatever was there before. Add a toast or a notification step; it usually fixes the copy and tells you the link was made.

How to Shorten URLs in Excel

Excel can't shorten a URL with a formula. The WEBSERVICE function sends a GET with no headers and no body, while a shortener API needs a POST with an Authorization header and a JSON body, and WEBSERVICE only exists in Excel for Windows anyway. Formula tutorials you find online were written for services that accepted the long URL as a query parameter, and those services are gone.

So the useful question is which of three working routes fits your sheet, and the answer depends almost entirely on how often it runs. Once is an import. Every Monday is a flow. Whenever someone opens the workbook is a script.

Route one: an Office Script

Office Scripts run TypeScript against the workbook and can call an external API with fetch. This is the route for a sheet you open and run by hand from the Automate tab. Put the destinations in column A, keep the API key in cell B1 of a sheet called Config, and the script fills columns B and C:

async function main(workbook: ExcelScript.Workbook) {
  const sheet = workbook.getActiveWorksheet();
  const key = workbook.getWorksheet("Config").getRange("B1").getText();
  const rows = sheet.getUsedRange().getValues();

  for (let i = 1; i < rows.length; i++) {
    const destination = String(rows[i][0]);
    if (!destination || rows[i][1]) continue; // skip blanks and rows already done

    const response = await fetch("https://api.elido.app/v1/links", {
      method: "POST",
      headers: {
        Authorization: "Bearer " + key,
        "Content-Type": "application/json",
        "Idempotency-Key": destination.slice(0, 255), // a re-run replays, it does not duplicate
      },
      body: JSON.stringify({ destination_url: destination }),
    });

    if (!response.ok) {
      sheet
        .getCell(i, 2)
        .setValue("error " + response.status + ": " + (await response.text()));
      continue;
    }
    const link = (await response.json()) as { short_url: string };
    sheet.getCell(i, 1).setValue(link.short_url);
  }
}

The skip on rows that already have a short link makes the script safe to run twice, and the Idempotency-Key header covers a run that died halfway: the API stores the response for 24 hours and replays it for the same key instead of creating a second link. The rate limits and idempotency guide explains why that matters in any loop.

The gotcha is where the script runs. Microsoft's page on external calls from Office Scripts says fetch works when you run the script in Excel and is not supported when Power Automate runs it. A script that works perfectly from the Automate tab fails the moment a flow triggers it, which has cost a lot of people an afternoon. And there's no secret store, so the workbook holding the key is now a credential.

Route two: a Power Automate flow

For anything on a schedule, a flow is the right tool, because it runs whether or not anyone has the workbook open. The shape is four steps:

1. A recurrence or file-changed trigger.
2. List rows present in a table, from the Excel connector.
3. Apply to each, with the HTTP action posting destination_url to the links endpoint and the Bearer header.
4. Update a row, writing short_url back next to the original.

Two things to know before building it. The generic HTTP action is a premium connector, so this route depends on your licence rather than your skill. And the key can sit in a secure input or come from a key vault, which is a genuine improvement over the script: the credential stops living in a file people email to each other. If the flow will process hundreds of rows, set a concurrency limit on the apply-to-each. The default fan-out can trip an API rate limit, and the fix is one setting.

Route three: export, bulk import, paste back

For a one-off, this beats both of the above on time to finished. Copy the URL column into the Elido import dialog's Bulk tab, or save it as a CSV with the columns url, slug, title and upload it on the CSV tab; each batch takes up to 100 rows and a bad row fails on its own. The bulk import from Google Sheets guide covers the format, which is the same whichever spreadsheet produced the file.

Getting the result back is easiest if you choose the slugs yourself. Put them in the slug column before you import, and the short link is plain text you can build in the sheet with ="https://go.yourbrand.com/" & B2. That formula is fine, because it joins two strings and sends nothing. No premium connector, no key in a workbook, no script to maintain.

Whichever route you pick, write four columns rather than two: the original URL, the short link, the slug, and a status or error. A half-finished run is then obvious and re-runnable instead of a column with silent gaps.

Why a formula would be wrong even if it could POST

Suppose WEBSERVICE could send a POST. It would still be the wrong tool, because formulas recalculate on Excel's schedule rather than yours. Each time the workbook opens, every row fires its request again: without an idempotency key that's a duplicate link per row per open, and with one it's still a burst of pointless traffic eating your rate limit. Anything that creates a resource belongs in code that runs when you say so. It's the same reason people get burned by NOW() in a sheet that feeds a report.

Want to see whether automation is worth building at all? Open a free workspace, import a five-row CSV, and you'll know in two minutes.

How to Shorten a Link for YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Drive or Maps

Most platforms hand you a short form of their own, and most of the confusion comes from not knowing what that short form already does. Each platform below gets the direct answer first, then the steps, then the one thing that goes wrong. The thread that runs through all six is the free-vs-branded choice from the top of this page: the platform's own short link is free and instant, and it never tells you anything or lets you change where it points.

For every one of them, the measuring side is the same job, which how to track social media links covers across channels.

How to shorten a YouTube link

Press Share under the video and YouTube gives you a youtu.be/VIDEO_ID link that's already about as short as it gets. Tick Start at first and the link keeps its timestamp as ?t= plus seconds.

1. Open the video on its own page, not inside a playlist, or the link carries &list= and drops viewers into the playlist.
2. Press Share, tick Start at if you want a start time, and copy. ?t=90 starts at one minute thirty, and YouTube also accepts the 1m30s form.
3. For a campaign, a slide or a podcast read, put a branded short link in front of that whole youtu.be string. go.yourbrand.com/demo can be read aloud; youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ is a spelling test.
4. Test the short link on a phone once. It should hand off to the YouTube app at the right second.

The gotcha is the timestamp. Shorten the full URL with ?t=90 included and the redirect delivers it intact. Shorten the bare video and try to bolt ?t=90 onto the short link afterwards, and most shorteners won't forward it: you find out when someone mentions the video started from the beginning. YouTube Analytics also reports such visits only as "External", so a tagged branded link is how you learn the newsletter beat the LinkedIn post. For Shorts specifically, trackable links for YouTube Shorts covers where a link can actually go.

How to shorten a Facebook link

Usually you don't need a shortener at all. "Shorten a Facebook link" is three jobs: your Page's address needs a username, a link copied out of the app needs its tracking parameters deleted, and your own URL that you're about to post needs a branded short link.

1. Page address: claim a username in the Page settings, and facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556... becomes facebook.com/yourbrand.
2. Copied post or profile link: keep the path up to the post ID and delete everything after the ?. The list: __cft__[0], __tn__, mibextid, rdid and fbclid, interface and referral noise that means nothing outside the session. Test the result in a private window.
3. A wrapped link that starts with l.facebook.com/l.php?u=: the real address is inside the u parameter, percent-encoded. Decode it, then shorten that. The h value is a signature tied to the wrapper, so hand-edited wrappers simply stop working; expand a short URL shows how to see through any redirect.
4. Your own page: shorten it on your domain with campaign tags on the target URL, so the click count sits at the link and the session lands in your analytics with the campaign attached.

The gotcha is fbclid on your own ads. Strip it from a link you're tidying up, but never from the landing URL of a running campaign: Meta documents that its value is stored in the _fbc cookie and used to match the click to the conversion, and cutting it breaks attribution silently. Click IDs explained covers it alongside Google's gclid. Also expect previews to come from the destination, not the short link: Facebook's crawler follows the redirect and reads the Open Graph tags at the end, so a missing card nearly always means missing tags, which fixing a broken link preview walks through.

How to shorten a LinkedIn link

For your profile, you don't shorten anything: you set a custom public URL so it reads linkedin.com/in/your-name. For URLs you put in posts, use a short domain with a short slug, because LinkedIn rewraps longer links in lnkd.in when you publish.

1. Profile: open your profile, choose Edit public profile and URL, and set the handle. LinkedIn's help page on the public profile URL has the current placement, which moves now and then. The handle is unique across LinkedIn, so expect /in/ana-kowalska-eu rather than /in/ana.
2. Changing the handle breaks the old address, so update your CV, email signature and anything printed.
3. In a post: paste a branded short link with a short slug, like go.brand.co/spring, and keep the campaign tags behind it rather than in the pasted URL.

The gotcha is the rewrap. Past a length threshold, commonly reported at around 26 characters, the post shows lnkd.in/xxxxx instead of your domain, so a carefully tagged go.yourbrand.com/spring-sale-2026?utm_source=linkedin loses its brand in the post. It doesn't lose data: lnkd.in resolves to your short link, which still records the click. Tagging behind the short link gives you the same attribution with none of the length. If you'd rather print a scannable code than the profile address, how to create a QR code covers LinkedIn's built-in code and a trackable one of your own.

How to shorten a link for X (Twitter)

Shortening a link for X saves you zero characters. X wraps every URL in t.co at publish time, and its developer documentation on counting characters says each one counts as 23 characters, whatever its length (accessed 2026-10-26). A post with one link has 257 characters left, full stop.

1. Put the link on a domain you own rather than a shared free shortener domain.
2. Add campaign tags to the long URL before you create the short link, so they're stored with the link and not in the post text.
3. Preview the post or publish it from a test account and confirm the card renders and the link lands on the right page.

So why shorten at all? Not for space. Modern X clients show the destination domain rather than t.co, so your domain is doing branding work whether you planned it or not. The click lands in your own data next to email and print, not only inside X analytics. And the destination stays editable: most accounts can't edit a post, but you can repoint the short link in the dashboard, or with a PATCH on the links API, and the post keeps working.

The gotcha is the double wrap and the preview. A visitor goes through t.co, then your short domain, then your page. Two quick server-side hops, and nobody notices, but if that page redirects twice more you're stacking hops that each give a query string another chance to get dropped. Keep your side to one hop. And the card under the post is built from the final page's tags, so a consent wall that serves crawlers an interstitial gives you a blank card; the Open Graph checker shows what a crawler sees before you post. Expect X's click count and yours to disagree: bot filtering and prefetching are counted differently, and neither number is lying.

How to shorten a Google Drive link

Copy the sharing link from Drive and shorten it. The part that decides whether it works happens before that: a shortener changes the address, never the permission, so set access on the file first.

1. Select the file in Drive, press Share, and look at General access before you copy anything. Google's sharing guide covers folders and shared drives too.
2. Restricted means only the accounts you added can open it; anyone else, short link or not, lands on the request-access screen. Anyone with the link means the link is the key.
3. Pick Viewer unless you really mean Commenter or Editor. Editor on an anyone-with-the-link file lets any recipient change the document.
4. Press Copy link, shorten it with a readable slug such as go.yourbrand.com/pricing-deck, and open the short link once in a signed-out browser to see what an outside recipient gets.

The gotcha is privacy, in both directions. A short link in front of an anyone-with-the-link file is exactly as public as the raw link, and easier to pass around; a shared folder also exposes everything added to the folder later. The redirect itself also records that a click happened, roughly when and from where, which is fine for a brochure and worth a thought for a contract. For anything confidential, share with named accounts and treat the short link as a convenience for people who already have access; password-protected short links cover the middle ground. What the short link adds is the ability to repoint: replace the file with a new upload and the Drive ID changes, but the link in last month's email still works.

How to shorten a Google Maps link

Open the place, tap Share, then Copy link, and Maps gives you a maps.app.goo.gl address that opens the app directly on a phone. Google retired its general goo.gl shortener in 2025, but links its own products generate, Maps sharing included, were not part of that retirement.

1. Copy from the place card, not from a long-press on the map. A place link opens your listing with the name, the opening hours, the reviews; a dropped pin is a nameless marker, and on a busy street people stand outside the wrong door.
2. For a message to one person, stop there.
3. For a flyer, a menu or a window sticker, put a branded short link like go.yourbrand.com/store in front of the maps.app.goo.gl link, tagged per placement if it goes in more than one place.
4. Make the QR code from the short link, not the long Maps URL. A shorter payload means fewer modules, a sparser code, and one that still scans when the sticker gets scuffed.

The gotcha is permanence. A Maps share link points where it points, so when a branch moves, everything already printed is wrong. A branded link in front is repointed in seconds and the window sticker keeps working; that's the difference between an edit and a reprint. How big should a QR code be has the sizing for a window. For a chain, give each location its own short link rather than one link to a store locator, and you'll see which stores the flyers actually moved. None of this changes how you rank in Maps, though. That's the profile and the reviews.

Other Ways to Shorten a URL: Bulk, API, Extension or QR

The paste-and-copy flow and the phone routes cover most people. Four other routes save real time at volume.

1. In bulk. Dozens or hundreds of links for one campaign go through the import dialog with their slugs and titles included, 100 rows per batch; the Excel section above and the Google Sheets import guide show the format.
2. Through the API, when shortening is part of an app or a workflow. It's the request the iPhone Shortcut sends, and the API and SDK quickstart has it in eight languages from Python to PowerShell, plus idempotency and error handling.
3. From the browser toolbar. Elido's extension for Chrome and Firefox shortens the current tab from a popup or the right-click menu; the browser extension guide covers what to check before installing any shortener extension.
4. As a QR code. Every short link can also be a QR code, the same redirect in scannable form, which how to create a QR code walks through. Industry-specific placements, from menus to property listings, are in URL shorteners by industry.

Before and After You Share a Short Link

Whichever route made the link, the same three checks apply once it exists: does it land where you meant, is it safe to put in front of people, and what will you do with the clicks. None takes more than a minute.

Check that it opens what you expected

Most failures after shortening aren't the shortener's fault. One command shows which hop broke:

curl -sIL https://go.yourbrand.com/spring | grep -iE '^HTTP|^location'

You want one redirect line, then a 200. Nothing else. Two or three location lines mean the target page redirects again on its own, which is where query strings and timestamps tend to get lost. A 404 on the first line means the slug is wrong or was changed; a 410 means the link has an expiry date that has passed.

Clean chain, wrong page? Look at what sits on the other side. A login wall (a private Facebook group, a restricted Drive file) stays a login wall. An app that opens links itself, like the YouTube or Maps app, may treat a parameter differently from the browser, so test on the phone your audience uses. And a link preview that shows the wrong image is cached by the platform, not served by the redirect. Short link not working walks through each of these in order, starting with the response headers.

One habit prevents most of it. Click every new short link once, on a phone, before it goes anywhere you can't edit, like a print run, a newsletter that has already been scheduled, or a post on a platform that won't let you change it. Ten seconds.

SEO and safety

A shortened URL goes in front of other people, so two questions deserve thirty seconds before you publish.

On SEO, a short link that returns a 301 passes ranking signals to the destination, so search engines credit the real page. The failure modes are the wrong redirect type and a flaky service; 301 vs 302 redirects for short links has the mechanics and whether URL shorteners hurt SEO the wider question. Used properly, the effect is neutral.

On safety, the short form hides the destination, which is why a reputable shortener scans targets for malware and phishing and why shared free domains end up filtered: short links get blocked in Slack and Teams when a stranger on the same domain misbehaves. It's the same reputation argument the platform sections made, and it's the strongest practical reason for your own domain. Are URL shorteners safe is the longer read.

What to do after the click

The link is the start. The reason to use a real shortener rather than a throwaway is what happens after the click.

Tag the destination with UTM parameters so the visit lands in your analytics with its campaign, and keep the tags consistent across a team. Read clicks by country and device in the link analytics, and how to track link clicks covers what the numbers mean. When a destination changes, a sale ending or a video re-uploaded or a branch moving, edit the link instead of reprinting what points at it. I'd argue that one ability, more than the shorter address, is why branded links outlast the campaigns they were made for.

Related on the Blog

• Setting up branded short links on your own domain
• How URL shorteners work under the hood
• How to track social media links
• Trackable links for YouTube Shorts