Custom aliases: naming links people remember

A random slug like x7Kp2 is fine for a chat message. Nobody types it — they tap it, and the characters never pass through a human. The moment a link lands on something physical or spoken, though, the alias stops being plumbing and becomes the interface. On a poster, a business card, a menu, a podcast ad, a slide at the back of a room, x7Kp2 is not a neutral default. It is a bug you printed five hundred copies of.

The test that decides a good alias is whether it survives being said out loud. Read it once, at normal speed, to someone who has never seen it, and watch them type it. Everything that fails does so in a predictable way. Numbers that are also words: is it 2 or two, 4 or four. Doubled letters nobody hears: summerrsale. Characters that need spelling out, which means you have already lost the room. And the pair that catches the most people, 0 against o and 1 against l, which look nearly identical in most printed fonts even when they sound completely different. summer-sale passes this test. smmr-sale-24b does not, and neither does menu2go.

Know the rules before you fall in love with a name, because two of them surprise people. Aliases are three to thirty-two characters, and the only characters allowed are lowercase letters, digits, hyphen and underscore. Lowercase is the one that catches everybody: Summer-Sale is rejected outright, not quietly converted. Brand names are almost always written capitalised, so the alias will not match the way you write your brand anywhere else, and that is worth deciding on purpose rather than discovering at the moment you are trying to publish.

The second surprise is that a short list of words is reserved and can never be an alias, because the site already uses those paths for itself — things like api, blog, faq, tools, privacy, admin, login and stats. They are exactly the short, obvious, memorable words a business reaches for first. If your instinct was luud.link/blog for your company blog, that instinct is good and the name is unavailable; go one word more specific.

Keep the length well under the ceiling. Around fifteen characters is a practical maximum for anything printed, and one hyphen is usually enough. Every extra character is another chance for a typo on a phone keyboard held one-handed, and the hyphen is the character people most often drop when copying from print — they hear "summer sale" and type summersale. If both spellings matter to you, claim both and point them at the same place.

Name the destination, not your campaign internals. Nobody outside your team knows what q3-promo-v2 means, and an alias like that leaks your planning to anyone who reads it. Worse, it dates instantly: summer-sale-2026 is visibly stale in January, while menu, tickets and booking stay true indefinitely. Since the destination behind an alias can be changed without touching what is printed, a name describing what the visitor wants is a name you can keep for years. A name describing this quarter is one you throw away with the flyers.

That repointing ability is the whole reason to think this hard about the name. The alias is the durable half of the pair and the destination is the disposable half. Rebuild the site, move platforms, replace the seasonal menu, and luud.link/menu keeps working on every card, sticker and window decal already out in the world. Get the name right once and it outlives several versions of whatever it points to.

Claim it before the design goes to print, not after. Aliases are first come, first served, and the worst possible moment to discover that summer-sale is taken is when the flyers come back from the shop. Reserve the name the day the campaign gets approved — pointing it at a placeholder page is fine — because a name costs nothing to hold and a reprint costs real money.

If the name you wanted is gone, resist the urge to reach for a near-miss. summer-sale2 and summer_sale are exactly the variants people mistype into somebody else’s link, which is worse than being unmemorable. Add a word that carries meaning instead: shop-summer, cafe-menu, bkk-tickets. Specific beats decorated.

One last habit, easy to break and expensive to break: do not rename anything mid-campaign. An alias that changes halfway through breaks every copy already shared or printed, and it splits your click history across two links so the totals stop being comparable. Pick the name carefully, claim it early, and then leave it alone.