In a world where every character has to be justified URL shorteners are just the best thing ever aren’t they! They take that super long address from an eCommerce site for those fantastic shoes you “just must have” and reduce it down into something that you are able to tweet or post about.
Some of them even let you customise the URL to increase trust, relevancy or even brand recognition, along with providing stats about who clicked what from where and when – useful information to run alongside the rest of the data you collect from your on-site analytics software.
So we decided to have a little round-up of the current crop and create an up-to-date URL shortening services list that contains tested shorteners that are still with us and working well.
Our favourite go-to one is by far and away Bit.ly, as it has we feel the most feature set (bookmarklet, stats, bundling, customisation of URLs, even customisation of the domain name if you want), with Ow.ly from those fab guys at Hootsuite coming in a close second.
The URL shortening services list below has all the services we have tested to be currently working (March 2014), whether they include additional options and if they have bookmarklets to make your life a little easier.
Tweet us if you think we missed any other good ones.
