Question
How does link shortening work?
Product
Email
Answer
When sending emails you may want to add links to your website or a form as a call to action for your recipients. At times the original links may be long and clunky and often times ruin the look of your email. As you may have seen, other emails have used URL (link) shortening sites such as t.co and bit.ly. However, spammers have abuse these link shortening sites hiding malicious links under them and as a result caused link shorteners to automatically be denied at times or listed as spam.
Rather than using a general purpose public link shortener, SendGrid can shorten links for you. If you are looking to shorten your Links URLs for cosmetic purposes or maybe, if you're trying to reduce your total Email size you have found the correct article!
Our Short Links feature will shorten your links by about 40%. One thing to keep in mind when Link Shortening is enabled is that the data retention window is reduced to 60 days from when the link is created. If a "short link" is clicked outside of this window, we would not track the link at all. A click will not be recorded, but the link will still work properly.
As well, keep in mind this only applies to links wrapped for Click Tracking, if your Click tracking settings are turned off this feature wouldn't have any impact.
How can I start shortening my links?
Contact the SendGrid Support team to enable this setting for a parent or sub-user account.