Short.io Journal

The Short.io Journal

Short.io Blog

Insights on link management, marketing analytics, and growth.

Latest 12 stories on this page

New! APAC servers in South Korea

What’s an edge location? If you create a website that’s based on the other side of the world, you’ll need to send internet data between you and that server.  That transmission happens at the speed of light — but even the speed of light is not immediate. To make a round trip from you to that website and back, it takes light around 200ms. Each response from a link takes more than a second, simply because of the fundamental laws of physics. This is why most companies employ Content Delivery Ne

Emanuil S.

New! A safer, more efficient Google-certified domain

The problem with “v.short.gy” By creating shortlinks on Short.io, you use our free “v.short.gy” domain for transparent links. ☝️In short, transparent links handle tracking, redirects, etc. for you, automatically, in the background. However, due to the popularity of v.short.gy, we experienced an issue with “noisy neighbors” — malicious actors which caused Google Ads to flag our domain. In truth, that was an issue with their internal checker, and it only affected the ability of our links to wo

Emanuil S.

New! Deep links

Previously, Short.io provided a simple way to generate universal links for you.  Enter any Apple or Android app name, and you can connect your link to the corresponding application. But many of our users wanted extra control and customization when creating universal links. We listened, and now, we’ve expanded your options. This new update allows you to not just connect, but edit your association files, too — right in Short.io. Just copy the association file’s JSON code, paste it in, and you

Emanuil S.

New! Restrict destinations

Your short links are more than just a means to an end — they also represent trust. Trust that your users have in your referrals. If you’re not careful, they can be abused by malicious actors, using your domain to lead users to websites you don’t intend them to visit. ⚠️This an issue of public APIs, which allow users to create short links from other people’s domains — this is a widely occurring misuse and, if you’re not careful — a security breach. Instead, the best way to combat this is to cr

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New! Hotkeys & shortcuts

Short.io now supports shortcuts! These are single keyboard keys you can press to access different parts of our web app much quicker. If you want to learn them, the “Hotkeys” button can teach you exactly how to master our easy-to-use, convenient shortcuts. This isn’t just for power users, either. Our shortcuts are easy enough that anyone can easily retain them.  ☝️Just to be clear, the hotkeys work even when the “Hotkeys” button isn’t pressed. Pressing the button just shows you the correct ho

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New! Bulk editing

Previously, if you wanted to select multiple rows at once, you either had to use our spreadsheet — an external solution — or click on rows one by one. Not ideal. Especially for a truly large number of links. Now, we’ve also added the “Bulk Field Update” button, significantly expanding what you can do with your short links — individually or all at once. Here’s how to use it: 1. Choose the field you want to edit in the “Field to edit*” box at the top. 2. Choose whether you want to replace an

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New! Columns customization

Knowing how your links are used is important. Sometimes, though, a piece of information might not be relevant to you, whether currently or in the long term. So we added the “Columns” button — under “Dashboard” → “Branded links” — a way to hide anything you don’t need, tightening up your UI and UX experience. Give it a try today!

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Post-mortem on Oct 20th AWS incident

Yesterday our hosting provider, AWS, experienced a long-running incident. It affected thousands of businesses worldwide (including ours). Incidents happen regularly, and we should be prepared for them. Below I explain why this one led to downtime for us. We received the first alerts from our monitoring at 07:18 UTC. It quickly looked like an infrastructure-provider issue, so we checked the AWS Status Page and saw reports of a widespread outage in the us-east-1 region. Within minutes, AWS identi

Andrii

Introducing Shortio.cn, our new short link platform for Mainland China

We’re very excited to announce Shortio.cn Launched this month, Shortio.cn is our new Short.io subsidiary, aimed at helping Mainland China keep links short. Short.io already works in Mainland China, but there were a few challenges our users were facing. In order to fully operate in the region, companies need a license — without one, there’s no guarantee a website will be operational indefinitely. That can, unfortunately, mean that our users’ short links in the region are potentially susceptib

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New! PayPal support

We’ve been using Stripe for years — we love its support for multiple payment methods, its transparent pricing model, and its robust API. But we didn’t support PayPal. It is, by far, the most requests we’ve gotten for a new payment service provider. Well, we listened, and we’re excited to announce that Short.io now has full PayPal support! This update will be particularly useful for people on the Hobby plan, allowing you to jump in completely hassle-free. Of course, users of other plans can al

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AI slug generation: the next step in ensuring privacy

We’re always committed to keeping your data as secure as possible. For us, it’s an inseparable part of our business model, and we prioritize it at every step. This latest change is no different. When creating short links, Short.io offers the option to use AI-generated slugs pulled directly from the content on your linked sites. But up until now, this option was turned off by default. Our previous approach Why? Well, because previously, data would pass through us, through Amazon Web Servic

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Wrapping up: Q2 2025

We do our best to continuously provide new features for our users. For us, it’s not just about adding cells to a spreadsheet, but about really making sure our users can push the utility of their links — all at the same price. But this quarter was especially productive. Over the last three months, we announced and implemented 7 major updates that significantly improve and expand Short.io’s feature set into something that can provide our users with even more value. Here’s everything we did.

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