Your links need to be user-friendly and easy to remember. Kori Ashton from WebTegrity can show you how to make shorter URL links in your #WordPress website for FREE.
Full Audio Transcript
Hey everybody. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday my name is Kori Ashton and you are probably trying to figure out how to take your really long links and make them shorter for a better user experience. I’m going to show you how to do that inside of your WordPress website on a budget of free because free is always in the budget right?
Let’s take a look at a plugin that’s going to help make your world a lot less complicated. I’ll show you an example here. If you look way up here at the top, you’re going to see this really crazy long URL that I have here and it’s on my careers page. Now some of us back in the old school days we’re told to have really keyword rich links and because of that, logically we created sentences on the inside of our URLs and that is horrible, but what we don’t want to do is go change that necessarily. Because that link probably lives somewhere else in your website and more than likely this link lives inside of Google indexing. If you’re doing a mailer or maybe a door hanger or some sort of a marketing piece, you don’t let somebody have to type of full sentence to get to this page. You want them to be able to type something really quick. Maybe even have something that they can retain in their memory on a car wrap or billboard. A shorter link that gets into this page. Anyway, this is how you do it. There’s a free plugin called URL shortener that I recommend. As of today, it has really great reviews.
It’s been up-to-date with the version 4.8. That is the most recent version in WordPress. So just a little side note. If you’re viewing this video later on down the road, I want you to be sure that these things are still relevant to you. That it’s. Up-to-date with your current version of WordPress and that still has really great reviews and that has been supported and updated recently. So this has been updated as of two weeks ago. Even so, if we want to use this, you’re going to go to your plugins and you’re going to click “add new” and we’re going to add it to the website and I’ll show you exactly what to do to have this work for you. We’re going to do a search for URL shortener and you’ll find it here. “URL Shortener Machine Shop”. “Install Now” and we’re going to activate it now that. That’s activated on our website. You’ve got a new area down here that lives left side and called “short links”, so if we want to click and “add new”.
What we’ll do is we’ll go back to the Careers page and we’ll grab this really long part of the URL here and copy that onto my clipboard. Come back over to “short link” and click “add new” now this is the short link you want to create. Now, this goes over to my careers page, remember? So I’m just going to say “careers” and then I’ll redirect it now to the full URL. So you grab this whole URL where this lives and you’re going to paste it in there. It’s really long crazy URL and you can address the redirect method. Is this something that’s just going to be temporary or is this a permanent fix, that this page no longer lives at this short link. It now lives here permanently, so to think of this I’m going to leave it to temporary. You can click “add link” and I’m going to show you how it works. So it’s going to be “WP” and then you type in “careers” and click enter and it redirects you perfectly over to our careers page with that longer URL visible. How cool is that y’all? That simple on the budget of free.
I hope this has helped you. If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, because every Wednesday I’m producing some sort of videos just like this to help you be an amazing online marketer with your WordPress website. See you next time, bye.
