Link Shortener

How to shorten a link

1. 1Paste the long address. Any web address, however long — a product page buried four folders deep, a map pin, a form with a tail of tracking parameters. It is kept whole; only what people see gets shorter.
2. 2Choose the ending, or don’t. Type something readable like summer-sale and the field tells you as you type whether it is still free. Leave it blank and a short random ending is made for you.
3. 3Copy it and put it to work. A bio, a caption, an email signature, a slide, a printed flyer. It is short enough to read aloud and to type from memory.
4. 4Watch what happens. Every click is counted — when it happened, roughly where from, on what kind of device, and which site sent it.

Why shorten a link at all

A long address is not just ugly. It wraps onto three lines in a bio, it breaks when someone pastes it into a message, it cannot be read out on a video or typed off a poster, and it tells you nothing afterwards about whether anyone followed it. A short link fixes the look and, more usefully, turns a link into something you can measure and change.

The important part is the second one. A normal link is final the moment you publish it: wrong destination, wrong campaign, a page you later move — and every copy already out there is dead. A KEMETORY link forwards through us, so it stays editable for as long as it exists.

Change where a link goes after you have shared it

Open the pencil on any link in Your links, enter a new destination, save. Every copy already shared, printed, pinned or saved by somebody else now forwards to the new page. The link itself never changes, and its click count carries straight over rather than starting from zero.

That is what makes it worth using on anything you cannot take back: the link in a bio that has to point at whatever is current, a QR code already printed on packaging, a card handed out at an event, or simply an address you got wrong and noticed too late. The ending you chose is fixed for good — that is the promise that makes the link safe to print — but where it leads is yours to change.

See who clicked, and which post sent them

Click any link’s click count to open its own report, and click again to close it. You can hold several open at once to compare them side by side. Each report shows:

• Total clicks, and how many were different people rather than the same person coming back to it.
• When they clicked, so you can see whether a post landed immediately or kept working for a week.
• Country and approximate city. Country reflects the address a click arrived from, which for anyone on a VPN is where their VPN comes out rather than where they are — those clicks are counted but listed separately instead of being filed under the wrong country. City is a rough hint at the best of times, because a phone on mobile data usually resolves to its carrier’s gateway rather than the person’s neighbourhood.
• Device, operating system and browser, as coarse labels — enough to tell a phone audience from a desktop one.
• The site that sent them, reduced to its host name.

That last line is the one worth building a habit around. Make a separate link for each place you post the same thing — one for the Instagram bio, one for the story, one for the newsletter, one for the flyer — and the reports stop being a single number and start telling you which channel is actually carrying your traffic. Name each one as you create it (“Autumn campaign”) so the list still makes sense to you in three months.

Link previews do not pollute any of this. When WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack or a search crawler fetches a link to build its preview card, that fetch is recognised and left out of the count. What you are looking at is people.

Links that stop, pause and come back

Give a link an expiry date and it forwards normally until then and stops afterwards — useful for an offer that should not outlive its own deadline. The power button switches a link off without deleting it, and back on whenever you like; switching off keeps the whole click history, deleting throws it away with the link. Nothing here is retroactive, so a link you paused last month still knows what it did the month before.

What is stored about the people who click

No IP address, no precise location, no personal detail, and nothing that identifies an individual. The network address a click arrives on is used to work out an approximate country and city and is then discarded. The browser’s user agent becomes a coarse device, system and browser label. The referring site is reduced to its host name and nothing else. The report is built to tell you about an audience, not about a person.

Free, and it stays yours

Shortening, custom endings and the full click report are free, with no per-link charge and no watermark on anything. A free KEMETORY account exists so that the links belong to you: it is what keeps them in Your links, keeps their click history, and lets you edit a destination months later. Pair a short link with the free QR code generator for anything printed and you get scan tracking on the code on top of click tracking on the link — and both stay editable after the ink is dry.