WP-Bitly

In December 2010, we decided to create our own customized Short URL for WPBeginner. Many bloggers use the generic link shortening services like ow.ly, bit.ly, tinyurl etc. Top brands like New York Times, TechCrunch, and others were using custom short urls like nyti.ms or tcrn.ch. We decided to follow their lead and started using “wpbeg.in” as our custom branded short URL. This is solely for branding purposes on our twitter account @wpbeginner.

We did this by using a service provided by Bit.ly called Bit.ly PRO. Now it was really a hassle to generate a short link manually every time we published a new article. Generating shortlinks manually is just inefficient. This is where the plugin WP-Bitly came in play. This plugin lets you connect your WordPress site with your bit.ly account.

Once you setup the plugin, you will see that it automatically creates a short URL for all posts and pages on your WordPress site. Most importantly, it hooks into the WordPress shortlink hook, so you can display it in your theme. Here is an article on how to display WordPress shortlinks in your theme.

The reason why it is super helpful for us is that we can simply grab the shortlink from the admin bar after publishing the post. This makes it super easy for us to share the link on our social media channels like Twitter.