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Link shorteners: the long and short of why you shouldn’t use them

• A blog post by the Government Communication Service.
• In the old days of social media, URLs used to count towards the character limit, so using a URL shortener was often a necessity. This isn’t the case anymore.
• Whilst these URL shorteners provide insights into how often a link is clicked, they offer little more than the social media platforms and Google Analytics offer natively.
• Short URLs provide no clue as to the content, and can’t be trusted. Some link shortening tools threaten user privacy too, installing cookies when people follow our links.
• GCS go into more detail on creating accessible links for social media:
  • One link per post (as “people who navigate via keyboard shortcuts often find it frustrating to navigate to multiple links”)
  • Clear calls to action (“Read guidance on applying for a driving license + LINK”)
  • Use capital letters at the start of each word in a hashtag, e.g. #AccessibilityAwareness. These tags are often turned into links, and assistive technologies reading the link text should read the words correctly when capitalised.

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