Blog
How to judge a link before you click it
Short links compress a URL at the cost of hiding its destination — and we run a shortener, so we'll say it plainly: healthy skepticism about links, including ours, is good for the web. Here's the checklist we'd give a friend.
Before you click
- Judge the context first. Who shared this, where, and does the link fit what they're saying? A link in a long-standing community discussion carries different odds than one in an unsolicited DM promising something urgent or free.
- Hover (on desktop). The status bar shows the actual URL under the text. If the visible text says one domain and the hover shows another, that mismatch is the story.
- Read the domain right-to-left. The part that matters is the last two segments before the first slash.
yourbank.example.comis a page on example.com, not your bank. - When unsure, don't click — ask. Any reputable shortener will check one of its own links for you. For ours, that's abuse@website-shortner.link.
After you land
- Check the address bar. Redirects are over; what's shown now is where you actually are. Make the "is this the site I expected?" call before interacting with the page.
- Treat credential and payment prompts as a stop sign. Arriving at a login page via a link you didn't type is the classic phishing setup. Navigate to the site yourself, or use your password manager — it won't autofill on an impostor domain.
- Pressure is a signal. Countdown timers, "your account will be closed," prizes that expire in minutes — urgency is the oldest tool for making people skip exactly these checks.
What a shortener owes you
The flip side of asking users to be careful is that link services have to hold up their end: enforce an acceptable-use policy, take reports seriously, and kill bad links fast. Ours are here — the policy and the report form — and reports are read by a human. A shortener's only real asset is that its domain means "this goes where it says." We intend to keep it that way.