Short URL Generator
Create a short URL for any web address. Paste your link below and you will have a compact, shareable address immediately — free and without an account.
How Zurl short URLs are built
The design choices behind the code are about making links survive contact with the real world.
Seven-character codes
Short enough to type from a printed page, long enough that codes cannot be guessed by trial and error.
No confusable characters
The code alphabet omits 0, O, 1, l and I, so a link read aloud or copied by hand still resolves.
Randomly generated
Codes come from a cryptographically secure source, so nobody can enumerate links by counting upwards.
HTTPS by default
Every short URL is served over an encrypted connection.
Query strings preserved
Campaign parameters and other query values pass through to the destination exactly as supplied.
Optional custom ending
Replace the generated code with your own wording using a free account.
The anatomy of a short URL
A short URL has three parts. Take https://zurl.world/a8K3xPq:
- The protocol,
https://, which encrypts the connection. - The domain,
zurl.world, which is the service holding the mapping. - The code,
a8K3xPq, which identifies which destination to redirect to.
Only the code changes between links. Everything about the design of a short URL is a trade-off around that code: shorter is easier to share, longer is harder to guess.
Why seven characters
Zurl uses seven characters from a 56-character alphabet, giving about 1.7 trillion possible codes. That is far more than will ever be used, and the point is not capacity — it is that the space is too large to enumerate. A shortener using sequential codes (link 1, link 2, link 3) is compact but lets anyone walk the entire database by counting.
The alphabet itself is base62 with the ambiguous characters removed. Dropping 0, O, o, 1, l and I costs a small amount of code space and eliminates the most common cause of a short link failing when someone types it manually.
Short URL versus custom URL
A generated short URL is the fastest option and needs no account. A custom short URL replaces the random code with wording you choose, which is worth doing whenever a person will read, speak or judge the link before clicking it.
Both redirect identically. The difference is entirely in how the link reads to a human.
Checking a short URL before you open it
Because a short URL hides its destination, treat unfamiliar ones with care. The URL expander resolves a short link and shows you where it leads without opening it, and the URL checker breaks any address down into its protocol, host, path and parameters.
Frequently asked questions
- What does a Zurl short URL look like?
- https://zurl.world/a8K3xPq — the domain followed by a seven-character code. With a free account you can replace the code with your own wording, giving something like https://zurl.world/spring-sale.
- Why do the codes skip certain letters and numbers?
- The alphabet excludes 0, O, o, 1, l and I because these are the characters people reliably misread. Short URLs are often read from a screen and typed by hand, printed, or dictated, so removing ambiguous characters prevents a whole class of mistyped links.
- How many short URLs can exist?
- Seven characters from a 56-character alphabet gives roughly 1.7 trillion combinations. Codes are generated randomly rather than sequentially, so they cannot be guessed by counting and do not reveal how many links exist.
- Is a short URL secure?
- Short URLs are served over HTTPS, so the connection is encrypted. The code itself is not a secret in the cryptographic sense — anyone with the link can open it. For links that need restricting, add a password when you create the link.
- Does a short URL slow down the page?
- It adds one redirect before the destination loads, typically a few milliseconds. Zurl records analytics after the redirect is sent rather than before, so the visitor is never waiting on a database write.
- Can a short URL point to another short URL?
- Technically yes, but Zurl flags it. Chaining shorteners hides the destination twice over and makes abuse review much harder, so a warning is shown when the destination is another known shortener.