Long, complex URLs confuse visitors, weaken click confidence, and make your site look amateurish. If you
A WordPress URL shortener lets you turn those messy links into clean, branded paths on your own domain. You get better shareability, easier management, and click data you can actually use. I have been running affiliate sites for over nine years, and short links are one of those small infrastructure choices that compounds over time.
Updated 2026.
This guide covers:
- How to create custom shortlinks in WordPress with Lasso
- How to create shortlinks using Simple URLs
- Six reasons you should use custom shorter URLs
- Whether you should use the Bring Back the Shortlink Button plugin
- How to set permalink settings to Post Name for quick SEO wins
1What Is a WordPress URL Shortener?
Monetization doesn’t only happen on your website. There’s social media and email too. Whether it’s on a podcast or YouTube, Lasso makes it simple with branded URLs that are both easy to say and remember.
A URL shortener is a tool that condenses long web addresses into shorter links. Sometimes the destination URL carries a long string of tracking parameters, session IDs, and product codes. That produces links with hundreds of characters that are hard to read, hard to share, and hard to trust.
Using a URL shortener reduces the visible length while still sending visitors to the correct page. On WordPress, a dedicated shortener plugin stores those redirects in your dashboard so you can update destinations without editing old posts by hand.
For operators managing affiliate revenue, this is not a vanity project. It is link infrastructure. Clean URLs sit alongside proper affiliate link management as part of how a serious publishing business runs.
2What Is a Custom URL Shortener?
A custom URL shortener goes one step further. Instead of sending people to a third-party domain like bit.ly, you attach your own site name to the shortened path.
Compare these two:
bit.ly/2Eaq2syourdomain.com/deals
You replace the generic shortener domain with your brand. Readers see your name before they click. That builds trust, especially on affiliate links where long query strings scream “tracking link.”
Many URL shortening services work with WordPress. If you are comparing bit.ly, TinyURL, or Pretty Links, we have a full breakdown of Pretty Links alternatives worth reading. Custom short links on your own domain give you the same cloaking benefit without sending traffic through someone else’s brand.
For a deeper look at why branded paths matter, see our post on practical reasons to use a vanity URL.
3How to Create Custom Shortlinks in WordPress with Lasso
Lasso is a WordPress plugin built for affiliate publishers who need more than basic link storage. It boosts click-through rates, simplifies link management, and lets you shorten any URL from inside your dashboard.
Every link you create uses your own custom domain. That makes URLs more memorable, more shareable, and more likely to get clicked. More clicks mean more commissions. Here is the full walkthrough.
Activate the Lasso Plugin for Your WordPress Blog
Head to app.getlasso.co and create your account. Once you finish signup, you land on your account details page where you can download the plugin.
Install and activate it on your WordPress site. A Lasso navigation link appears in your left admin sidebar. You are now ready to shorten links.
If you want the full onboarding sequence, read our guide on getting started with Lasso.
Create a New Link in the Lasso Dashboard
Click Add New Link in the Lasso dashboard. A pop-up appears with an empty URL field. Paste the long link you want to shorten.
Lasso redirects you to the Link Details page for that URL. This is where you shape the branded short link. On this page you can adjust:
- Primary destination (target URL): where visitors land after the click
- Permalink: the short slug people see in the browser
- Name: an internal label to keep your link library organized
Your shortened links use your website’s domain name. That reinforces brand authority every time someone shares a link on social, email, or a podcast show notes page.
Under the Locations tab, Lasso shows every post and page where that specific link appears. You can add any URL to Lasso, from affiliate links to referral links to custom post types.
Once your library grows, search by name or URL. The search field also shows your total link count at a glance.
Configure and Customize Your Shortened URLs
Lasso lets you set defaults for how links behave site-wide. Toggle any of these on or off:
- New Window / New Tab: opens the destination in a new tab so readers stay on your article
- NoFollow / NoIndex: tells search engines not to follow or index the link. Use this on affiliate URLs.
- Sponsored: signals a paid or promotional relationship to search engines
- Show Disclosure: tells readers the link is monetized
You can override these settings on individual links from the Link Details page.
Lasso also supports pass-through parameters when you need extra tracking customization on specific URLs.
Track Clicks So You Can Measure Performance
Connect Lasso to Google Analytics to see which short links earn clicks. Go to Settings > General, paste your GA tracking ID, and enable click tracking.
Lasso sends click events to GA. To view them, open Behavior > Events > Top Events. Your top events sort by click volume from highest to lowest.
Click any event to compare text link clicks against product display clicks. If you want to know how often readers clicked a Survey Junkie display versus a plain text link, drill into that event for the split.
Tip: Open Pages beneath Top Events to see which URLs on your site drive the most link clicks. That data tells you where to double down on content.
For the full GA setup walkthrough, read how to connect Lasso to Google Analytics. Pair click tracking with a periodic content audit and you start seeing which topics actually convert.
Run an Opportunities Scan while you are in the dashboard. Most operators find unmonetized product mentions or stale URLs sitting in archives they already wrote. Short links are easier to manage when you know which URLs on your site are worth shortening in the first place.
4How to Create Shortlinks Using Simple URLs
Not ready for a premium stack? Our free Simple URLs plugin is a budget-friendly starting point.
Simple URLs lets you create branded short links on your own domain and manage them from a single dashboard inside WordPress. No separate SaaS account required.
From your WordPress admin, go to Plugins and search for “Simple URLs.” Install and activate it. A Simple URLs link appears in your left sidebar.
Click Add New, name your link, paste the target URL into the Redirect URL field, and click Update. Done.
Your Simple URLs dashboard shows each link’s title, target URL, permalink, and click count. It covers the basics well. When your site outgrows free tooling, Lasso picks up where Simple URLs leaves off with displays, broken-link alerts, and opportunity detection.
5Six Reasons You Should Have Custom Shorter URLs
There are plenty of reasons to shorten URLs on a WordPress site. These six show up on every affiliate property we run.
Cloak Affiliate Links
Affiliate URLs are long by design. Tracking parameters, merchant IDs, and campaign codes stack up fast. A reader who sees a 200-character link wonders what they are clicking into.
A short branded path on your domain removes that doubt. It also helps when you share links on platforms outside your site, which is where a lot of affiliate revenue still originates.
Boost Trust
Custom descriptive URLs look intentional. Long raw links look suspicious. Keeping your brand name in every outbound path raises click confidence, and click confidence is the whole game for monetized content.
Streamline Link Management
When every shortened link lives in one dashboard, you stop hunting through old posts to update a broken merchant URL. Lasso organizes links into groups, lists, and galleries so you can find what you need in seconds instead of opening the block editor on fifty pages.
Help With SEO
Short, keyword-rich URLs are an on-page SEO best practice. They tell search engines and humans what the destination is about before anyone clicks. Longer URLs also carry more risk of typos and broken formatting when pasted into emails or social posts.
Improve Social Sharing
Short links fit cleanly into tweets, YouTube descriptions, podcast show notes, LinkedIn posts, and newsletter buttons. Every character you save is room for a stronger hook. Shorter paths also look cleaner in screenshots and slide decks.
Simplify Tracking
Click counts per link tell you what your audience cares about. A spike on one shortened path might mean you should write more content around that topic. Some tools also show you who shared a link, which helps you spot distribution channels worth investing in.
6Should You Use the Bring Back the Shortlink Button Plugin?
WordPress used to show a Get Shortlink button in the Classic Editor. They removed it after version 4.4 because the default shortlinks were not very useful.
The Bring Back the Shortlink Button plugin restores that button. But here is the catch: the shortlink it generates appends ?p= followed by a post ID. On my site, that turned an SEO-friendly slug like tequila-gifts into ?p=419.
That is shorter in character count, but worse in every way that matters. It does not improve shareability. It is not memorable. It does not help branding.
WordPress still creates shortlinks behind the scenes. They just hide the button because the output is weak.
If you want the button back anyway, install and activate the plugin from the Plugins page. The Get Shortlink button reappears next to Edit in the Classic Editor.
If you do not want another plugin for a single button, add the snippet to your theme’s functions.php file instead. Not comfortable editing theme files? Use the Code Snippets plugin to add custom PHP without touching core theme code.
For serious short link work, a dedicated URL shortener plugin on your own domain is the better path.
7Set Your Permalink Settings to Post Name for Quick SEO Wins
Short links start with short permalinks on your own posts. Before you publish your first article, set WordPress to use the Post name structure.
Go to Settings > Permalinks and select Post name. This keeps URLs clean and descriptive without baking dates or random strings into every path.
Do not include the month or year in your permalink structure. When you update a post in 2026, an old date in the URL still signals staleness to search engines even if the content is fresh.
WordPress defaults to using your full headline as the slug when you create a post. That often produces URLs that are too long. Click Edit next to the permalink and shorten the slug to the essential keywords.
Example: a post titled “The 17 Best Tequila Gifts for Bourbon Lovers Who Want to Try Something New” might slug down to tequila-gifts. Same intent, half the characters.
This is built into WordPress already. No plugin required. Combined with a URL shortener for outbound affiliate links, you get clean paths everywhere on your site.
8Put Short Links to Work on Your Site
Using a WordPress URL shortener touches more than aesthetics. You get cleaner affiliate links, stronger brand presence on every outbound click, and tracking data that tells you what is working.
Reconfiguring long links into short ones is a small task. But on a site with hundreds of monetized URLs, it is the kind of infrastructure work that separates hobby blogs from publishing businesses.
We built Lasso because link management, displays, and opportunity detection belong in one system. If you want the full product rationale, read why you need Lasso. Then run an Opportunities Scan to find the links worth shortening first.
Ready to clean up your URLs and earn more from every click? Start with Lasso today.
Sean Brison
Sean Brison is a dad, writer, business owner, and Content Lead at Lasso. He's spent the past several years in cahoots with Lasso's founder, Andrew, creating awesome things for people. He's also addicted to perfectly-balanced cocktails, the outdoors, and John…