Guide
Do short links expire — and what breaks when they do?
A short link is a promise that an address will keep resolving. It is worth knowing exactly what that promise depends on, because the ways short links die are mostly not the one people expect.
Four ways a short link stops working
Explicit expiry is only the first and most visible of them. In practice the others cause more breakage, because nobody is watching for them.
- A time limit on the link. The service set an expiry date at creation, often on a free or anonymous tier. Predictable, and usually disclosed.
- The account went away. Links tied to a subscription can stop resolving when the plan lapses, the trial ends, or the account is closed. This surprises people, because the link worked yesterday and nothing about the link changed.
- The service shut down. URL shorteners have a long history of closing and taking every link with them. Google's goo.gl is the best-known example: new links were retired first, and the existing redirects were switched off years afterwards, breaking addresses embedded in a decade of documents, slide decks and printed material.
- The domain lapsed or got blocklisted. If you use a custom domain and forget to renew it, every link on it dies at once. The same happens if a shortener's own domain lands on a security blocklist because of abuse it failed to contain.
How long a Linkonda link lasts
| How the link was made | Expiry | Custom expiry per link |
|---|---|---|
| Without an account | 30 days from creation | No |
| Free account | No expiry | No |
| Plus | No expiry | No |
| Pro | No expiry | Yes — set per link, in days |
| Enterprise | No expiry | Yes — set per link, in days |
The important line is the second one: a free account is not a trial with a hidden clock. Links made while signed in carry no expiry date at all, on every plan including the free one.
Why anonymous links expire and account links don't
An anonymous link has no owner. Nobody can be notified about it, nobody sees it in a dashboard, and nobody can take it down if the destination later becomes something it should not be. A permanent redirect with no accountable owner is exactly the kind of thing that attracts abuse, so it gets a fixed, short lifetime instead.
Once a link sits in an account, all of that changes: there is someone to contact, somewhere to see it, and a way to pause it. The expiry stops being necessary, so it is removed — including for links you made before you signed up, once you claim them into the account.
Making your links outlast the service
The strongest protection is not a promise from a vendor; it is owning the address. With a custom domain, your short links live on a hostname you control. If you ever leave, you can point that hostname somewhere else and keep the addresses working — which is not possible when the links are on someone else's domain.
Beyond that, three habits help:
- Keep a record of the mapping. Your links and their destinations are listed in the dashboard and available through the API, so an export is straightforward.
- Do not use anonymous links in anything printed, published, or archived. Thirty days is short, and paper outlives it.
- Set a renewal reminder for any custom domain. A lapsed domain breaks every link on it simultaneously, and it is a self-inflicted failure that is entirely avoidable.
Pausing is not expiring
A paused link is deliberately switched off but still yours: the record stays, the slug stays reserved, and you can switch it back on. Pausing is available to any signed-in account and is the right tool when a destination is temporarily wrong or a campaign is over but might return.
Expiry is the opposite — it is unrecoverable, and the short URL is retired, never reused. If you are tempted to let something expire to take it out of circulation, pause it instead and keep the option to bring it back.
Frequently asked questions
- Do short links expire?
- It depends entirely on the service and the plan. Some links carry an explicit expiry date, some last as long as the account that owns them, and some die when the shortening service shuts down or loses its domain. On Linkonda, links created without an account expire after 30 days; links created inside an account do not expire, including on the free plan.
- What happens when a short link expires?
- The redirect stops. Visitors get an error rather than the destination. The original long URL is unaffected — it is only the short address that stops resolving, so anything already sharing that short link breaks.
- Can an expired short link be restored?
- On Linkonda, no. Once an anonymous link passes its expiry it can no longer be claimed, and its short URL is retired for good: it tells visitors the link has expired and is never given to anyone else. Claim anonymous links into an account before they expire if you need them to last.
- Do free short links last forever?
- On Linkonda, links in a free account have no expiry date. That is not universal — several shorteners apply a time limit or a monthly quota to free tiers, and some retire links when an account goes inactive. Check the specific service before relying on a free link long term.
- Can I set my own expiry date on a link?
- Yes, on the Pro and Enterprise plans, where each link can be given its own expiry in days. On other plans links are either permanent (signed in) or fixed at 30 days (anonymous).