How the link shortener works
A short link is a redirect, not a copy
When you shorten a URL, luud.link stores your destination and hands back a short address of its own. No copy of your page is made and nothing about it is republished. A click on the short link asks our edge network where to go, gets your destination back, and continues there — so the visit arrives on your site exactly as it would have, and whatever analytics you already run still sees it.
The consequence worth understanding is that the two halves are independent. The short link is a name you publish; the destination is a setting you can change. Repoint it a year later and every copy already shared, screenshotted, or printed inside a QR code follows the new destination without being reissued.
When shortening earns its place
A short link is doing real work anywhere the address is read by a human rather than tapped: posters, packaging, business cards, a slide at the back of a room, an address spoken out loud in a video. A seventy-character URL with a session parameter does not survive that trip. Eighteen characters does.
It also earns its place anywhere the platform is hostile to long URLs — chat apps that wrap them across two lines and break the tappable region, captions that never linkify, a profile with a single link slot every campaign wants to overwrite.
And it pays for itself whenever the destination is not final. A seasonal menu, a campaign page, a document that will move to a new system next year: publish the short link, change what sits behind it, and nothing you printed goes stale.
Custom aliases, and the naming rules
The alias is the part after the slash. Leave it blank and you get a random one, which is perfectly fine for a link someone taps in a chat and quietly wrong for anything printed. Type your own and the link becomes readable: luud.link/summer-sale instead of luud.link/x7Kp2.
Aliases are 3 to 32 characters long, and the only characters allowed are lowercase letters, digits, hyphen and underscore. Uppercase is rejected outright rather than quietly converted, which catches nearly everybody the first time — brand names are usually written capitalised, and the alias will not match. A short list of words the site uses for its own pages, including blog, faq, tools, about, privacy and report, is reserved and cannot be claimed.
Names are first come, first served. Claim one the day a campaign is approved rather than the day the flyers come back from the printer; holding a name costs nothing and a reprint does not.
Options you can set on a link
Under "more options" there are four settings, all optional and all free. An expiry date stops the link working after a chosen day, which suits a registration window or a time-limited offer. A click limit does the same thing by count instead of by date — useful for a capped invitation.
A password puts an unlock step in front of the destination, so the address can be shared publicly while the content behind it stays restricted. And the UTM builder attaches source, medium and campaign tags to your destination, so the analytics at the far end can attribute the visit — the tags ride on the destination side of the redirect, which is why they survive the platforms that mangle long URLs.
What the click statistics can and cannot tell you
Every link counts its clicks and breaks them down four ways: country, device type, referrer host, and date. That is enough to see whether your audience is who you assumed, whether your landing page needs to work on a small screen first, and which channels are actually carrying the link.
It is deliberately not enough to identify anybody. No IP addresses and no identifiers are stored, so there is no unique-visitor count and no way to follow one person across two clicks. Referrers are also missing more often than people expect — messaging apps, QR scans and typed addresses all send none, and those clicks land together as direct. Read direct as an absence of information rather than as a channel.
Questions about short links
Is it really free, and is there a limit?
Yes — every feature on this page is free, with no account and no per-link fee. Advertising on our own pages pays for the service. Rate limits exist to stop automated abuse, but normal use does not come close to them.
Do short links expire?
Not unless you ask them to. A link keeps working indefinitely unless you set an expiry date or a click limit yourself, or unless it is removed for breaking the terms of use.
Can I change where a link points after I have shared it?
Yes. Open the management page for that link and edit the destination; the short address stays exactly the same, so anything already shared or printed keeps working and now points somewhere new.
Can I see who clicked my link?
No, and that is by design. You get country, device type, referrer and date. No IP addresses or identifiers are stored, which means unique visitors and individual people are questions the statistics cannot answer.
What happens if I lose the management link?
The short link carries on working and counting clicks, but it can no longer be edited or deleted — the management key is not recoverable, by you or by us. Sign in with Google before creating links if you would rather they stayed recoverable from an account.
Do I need an account?
No. Shortening works with no account at all, and links made that way live in your browser plus the secret management URL you are given. Signing in is optional and does one thing: it lets your links follow you between devices.