What's New at Linkly

We're kicking off the new year with a fresh look! Linkly has a brand new logo that better represents who we are and where we're heading.

The new design features a bold, modern "L" icon with our signature orange, red, and blue colors, paired with clean typography.

You'll see the new logo rolling out across the Linkly dashboard, browser extension, and all our integrations over the coming weeks.

Here's to a great 2026!

We've improved the QR code logo editor to add options for logo padding and eye styles. We've set the default background to be transparent.

We're excited to announce our official Make.com integration, bringing powerful visual automation to Linkly users.

Make.com (formerly Integromat) is a popular automation platform that lets you connect apps and build workflows visually without code.

What You Can Do

With the Linkly Make.com integration, you can:

• Create new shortlinks with full configuration (UTM parameters, tracking pixels, Open Graph metadata, and more)
• Update existing links by ID
• Delete links when no longer needed
• Get link details for use in other scenario steps
• List all links in your workspace
• Watch clicks instantly when any link is clicked (instant trigger)

Getting Started

In Make.com, search for "Linkly" when adding a new module to your scenario. Connect your Linkly account using your API key from your workspace settings.

Find the Linkly integration on Make.com

Check out our full documentation for setup instructions and use cases.

Previously, commas in URLs were declared unsafe and as such were not usable in URL fields in Linkly.

We've adapted this and now URLs fully support commas in Linkly.

We're introducing fair use limits for the Analytics API to ensure reliable service for all customers.

Why We're Making This Change

As Linkly has grown, so have the costs of running our analytics infrastructure. A small number of accounts have been making extremely intensive API requests, which impacts performance and costs for everyone. These limits ensure fair access while keeping the service sustainable.

What's Changing

The Analytics API now has usage limits that reset each billing period:

• Free Plan: 100 requests / month, 10 GB data scanned / month
• Monthly Paid: 2,000 requests / month, 2 TB data scanned / month
• Annual Paid: 24,000 requests / year, 24 TB data scanned / year

Rate limits are also in place: 50 requests per hour per workspace.

What This Means For You

Most users won't notice any change. These limits are designed to only affect the most intensive usage patterns. If you're using the API for standard reporting and data export, you're unlikely to hit these limits.

Monitoring Your Usage

You can monitor your API usage in the Billing section of your account settings. This shows your current usage against your limits.

Need Higher Limits?

If you need more capacity for your application, please talk to us using the support widget. We're happy to discuss options for high-volume use cases.

Alternatives for Heavy Usage

For customers with intensive analytics needs, consider our BigQuery Integration, which provides direct SQL access to your click data without API rate limits.

For full details, see the Analytics API documentation.

Today we have deployed a significantly improved way of generating hundreds of short links in Linkly.

Linkly now has an embedded spreadsheet which allows you to manage your imports visually.

Linkly's old CSV upload continues to be available is linked from the navbar at the top of the spreadsheet.

This feature is a beta and we welcome feedback from users.

We're excited to announce the Linkly MCP server for Claude Desktop, allowing you to manage your short links through natural conversation.

What You Can Do

Once connected, simply ask Claude to:

• Create links - "Create a short link for https://example.com with UTM source twitter"
• View analytics - "How many clicks did my links get this week?"
• Update links - "Change the destination of my promo link"
• Search links - "Find all links related to the product launch"
• Manage webhooks - "Set up a webhook for click notifications"

Getting Started

1. Get your API key from Settings → API in Linkly
2. Add the Linkly MCP server to your Claude Desktop config
3. Start chatting!

Check out our full setup guide for detailed instructions.

We're excited to announce our official n8n integration, bringing powerful workflow automation to Linkly users.

n8n is a flexible workflow automation platform similar to Zapier, with the added benefit of self-hosting options and a visual workflow builder.

What You Can Do

With the Linkly n8n node, you can:

• Create new shortlinks with full configuration (UTM parameters, tracking pixels, Open Graph metadata, and more)
• Update existing links by ID
• Delete links when no longer needed
• Get link details for use in other workflow steps
• Trigger workflows instantly when any link (or a specific link) is clicked

Getting Started

Install the Linkly node from n8n's community nodes: Settings > Community Nodes > Search for "linkly"

Or via npm: npm install @linkly-link-shortener/n8n-nodes-linkly

Check out our full documentation for setup instructions and use cases.

Our Zapier integration has been upgraded to version 3.0 with instant click webhooks.

New triggers:

• Any Link Clicked (⚡ Instant) - fires immediately when any link in your workspace is clicked
• Specific Link Clicked (⚡ Instant) - fires immediately when a specific link is clicked

Click events now trigger in real-time instead of polling every 15 minutes.

Webhooks (Beta) lets you receive real-time POST notifications when your links are clicked. Perfect for Zapier automations, custom analytics, CRM integrations, and lead tracking.

Configure webhooks per-link or workspace-wide in Settings. Payloads include country, device, browser, referer, and UTM parameters.

See the webhooks documentation for setup details.

Linkly now supports keyboard shortcuts for faster link creation.

• Press Ctrl/Cmd+Enter on the dashboard to create a new link.
• Press Ctrl/Cmd+Enter on the new link form to save a link.
• Press Escape anywhere to return to the dashboard.
• Press Ctrl/Cmd+K to search the links.

View the complete keyboard shortcuts reference guide for more details.

We've made it easier to rename workspaces. There is now a dedicated workspace settings page.

Linkly's Analytics now allows you to view the data by hour.

This also applies to all API endpoints and Google Sheets.

It's also fully integrated with timezone support.

We've adjusted the way "Block robots" works to now block all social media crawlers.

If you also enable "ignore social crawlers," it will permit these through and not track them, even if block robots is enabled.

We've added functionality to filter by Internet Service Provider.

We've improved the way referrers are handled.

The options are now pass through referrers, or to hide them entirely.

Improving on from our change on October 26 to stop tracking social media crawlers, we have exposed this functionality as an option for users who would like still track these robots.

We now automatically filter out URLs containing .php and /wp-admin in them. These will return a 404.

This will reduce the number of malicious clicks on root domains attached to Linkly.

We have improved our uptime monitoring and response process, in response to outage on October 15, 2025.

We have added response times, monitoring for separate services and endpoints.

We are continuing to roll out backend improvements that will improve reliability for our customers.

You can see our current uptime at https://status.linklyhq.com.

We've improved the way Linkly handles social media crawlers from Facebook, YouTube, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Now, when traffic from these servers hits your links, it isn't recorded and it doesn't count against click limits.

However, the robot is transparently redirected to the correct destination.

We now also always permit these crawlers through even when the block robots feature is being used.

This improves a scenario where users are heavy users of social networks and find their click limits would be consumed by social media crawlers.

Learn more about bot traffic →

We've improved the way our bot blocking works to show more useful information.

It also includes the hosting provider we identified.

We've updated the response code to be 403.

Today we've published an update for API users that accelerates responses by approximately 300ms.

This will allow bulk uploads and API integrations to operate more quickly.

Summary

On October 15, Linkly experienced a prolonged outage caused by an automated deployment that introduced a configuration error in production. The issue also disabled key elements of our monitoring and alerting systems, delaying detection and response.

Root cause

A missing safeguard allowed an automated deployment to execute outside approved windows, resulting in a configuration mismatch that disrupted routing. Monitoring checks failed to detect the outage because they were scoped to internal endpoints that continued returning success.

Corrective actions

1. Disabled automatic deployments; production now requires manual approval.
2. Implemented external monitoring independent of our core infrastructure.
3. Added redundant alerting channels (SMS and voice) to ensure immediate awareness of incidents.
4. Introduced deployment locks during off-hours until 24/7 on-call coverage is established.

Next steps

We are reviewing our operational procedures and expanding incident response coverage to ensure rapid detection and recovery from any future issues.

Closing

We apologise for the disruption and thank our customers for their patience. Reliability remains our top priority, and we are committed to preventing a recurrence.

On October 15 2025, Linkly experienced a major outage that disrupted service for many customers.

Our monitoring and recovery systems also failed, which is why the issue was not reflected on the status page in real time. Service was fully restored after approximately five hours.

We understand the impact such outages have - both in lost revenue and customer trust - and we take this extremely seriously.

We are implementing significant infrastructure and monitoring improvements to prevent this from happening again.

We apologise for the disruption and appreciate your patience. If you need assistance, please reach out to our team.

A detailed summary of the corrective measures will be published in our release notes once completed.

We've improved Linkly's handling of URLs that are corrupted by invisible characters when copy-and-pasting from apps like Gmail.

Typically, this produces invisible characters which formerly caused the links to be 'not found'.

We've made a change to explicitly strip these characters when we see them.

We have improved the raw data export and moved this to an API endpoint, allowing you to get raw data from Linkly into Google Sheets and your applications.

Linkly now allows you to add custom sub-domains, improving the look and customisation of vanity URLs.

You can now view QR codes in your dashboard directly.

This includes formatting changes, logos, and custom QR codes.

We've added custom favicon support to custom domains. You can now override the Linkly logo and use whatever favicon you desire.

Today, we've released a significant improvement to our QR code editor.

This update allows you to add logos, change colors, and styles, and download QR codes as high-resolution PNG and JPEG images ready for printing.

On September 19, at approximately 1830 UTC, Linkly's servers were subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack, which caused degraded performance and some customers' links to be affected. The issue persisted for approximately 30 minutes.

The attack was targeted at one of our customer's domains. We identified the source and re-routed traffic away from Linkly.

Today, we've released updates that should help mitigate future DDOS attacks.

Linkly's traffic reports now support multiple timezones.

Select your timezone from the dropdown list at the top of the traffic reports.

Underlying data is always recorded in UTC and transformed at the point of query.

Data in the links dashboard is shown in UTC only.

We've updated our QR code implementation to support downloading in lossless SVG format, as well PNG format.

See 'How to Create a QR Code' for more details.

Today we fixed an issue involving anchors and UTM tags and parameter forwarding.

In the past, anchors that were present on the destination URL would be stripped under these transformations.

We've made a change where the anchors are now preserved when using these features.

Linkly is pleased to offer a new product - Userbird, a comprehensive Google Analytics replacement, designed for marketers.

Building on the same scalable analytics expertise behind Linkly, we've designed the new platform to offer the kind of analytics we always wanted. Designed for marketers.

Find out more and try it for free at Userbird.com.

We've migrated our primary public URL shortener domain to the new domain linkly.link.

All new links will be generated on this domain by default.

URLs generated on the old domains 2ly.link and 3ly.link will continue to function, and are still available as alternative URLs. Links are mirrored across all domains.

On 1st June 2025, Linkly's pricing will increase.

For monthly plans, the new pricing will be:

Annual plans get two months free, saving 17% over monthly plans.

Domains will increase to $23/year, or $34.50 for premium TLDs.

Switch to an Annual Plan and Save

In addition, for customers who switch to an annual plan before 1st June 2025, they will be able to retain their current pricing for a further 12 months.

Linkly has extended its Google Sheets live data feeds integration to now work with Microsoft Excel. Please see here for how to get live feeds into Excel.

We've migrated all references to Twitter to now be X.

X cards (formerly Twitter cards) open graph markup remains as the same, as specified in X's documentation.

We've dramatically improved the search in our documentation section to make it easier to find help when you need it.

We've made it easier to get started using custom domains. Now, when you successfully attach a domain for the first time, Linkly will show you exactly how to create a link using that domain.

We've made a change that fixes the link creation date for large workspaces (those with more than 10,000 links in them).

Exporting links now includes rules. This means that geotargeting, device targeting, and link rotators all appear in exported CSV sheets as escaped JSON.

Linkly's Google Chrome plugin has been updated to require fewer permissions (only activeTab).

This improves the user privacy of the plugin.

The Chrome plugin allows users to generate short links using Linkly's URL shortener in one click.

You can download the plugin at the Google Chrome Webstore here.

The plugin source code is available on GitHub.

On March 14, 2025, Linkly was subject to a denial-of-service attack that resulted in our app being offline for approximately 65 minutes, in two chunks.

The attack was targeted at one of our customers.

During the attack, over 1 billion requests were sent to our servers, in minutes.

This affected a number of our customers, whose links were offline or suffered from degraded performance during this time, and our web app was inaccessible.

We mitigated the attack by applying Cloudflare's WAF at our edge, which was able to block the attack while allowing legitimate traffic through.

Actions for Future Mitigation

We will be applying Cloudflare's edge throughout our network, which will help mitigate future denial-of-service attacks as they happen, without interruption of service.

You can monitor Linkly's uptime here: https://status.linklyhq.com.

We've added a feature today that will automatically strip leading and trailing whitespace in:

• URLs set as destinations
• Rule URLs
• Slugs when used with custom domains.

This change has been applied whether links are created by the new link form, CSV, or API.

We have increased the maximum parameter length to be 36 characters.

We have added specific filters to drop click IDs from ad networks such as Google, Meta and TikTok. See the parameters and SubID guide for the full list of stripped parameters.

We have performed some security maintenance on our systems and updated our infrastructure to the latest in-support packages.

This update only affects enterprise customers performing security audits on Linkly, and improves security.

Starting in January 2025, Linkly will be required to collect VAT for customers based in the EU.

Businesses in the EU do not need to pay VAT if they present a valid European VAT number.

You do not currently have a VAT number on your account.

If you have a valid VAT number, please update your billing details to include it by following the instructions here:

https://linklyhq.com/support/add-a-vat-number

Please note, it isn't possible for us to refund VAT collected if a VAT number wasn't provided at the time of the charge.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us through the chat widget in your account.

We've released an update today that requires SSL (https) on all short-links.