About Xlyl

What it does

You paste a long URL and get a short one back. That short link can live on your own domain, carry a password, expire on a schedule, and be pointed somewhere else later without the link itself changing. Every click on a link made with an account is counted, with a breakdown by country, browser, operating system and referrer.

You do not need an account to shorten a link. You need one to keep a link, edit it, or see its statistics. See the full feature list.

Why editable links matter

The reason to use a shortener is rarely length. It is that a printed flyer, a slide deck or a published article cannot be edited once it is out in the world — but the link in it can be, if it points through a shortener you control. A campaign URL that changes, a product page that moves, a document that gets re-uploaded: none of those have to break the thing you already published.

How your data is handled

Each click on a link made with an account is recorded with its time, location, device, browser, referring page, language and campaign tags. The location is derived from the IP address without keeping the address, and unique visitors are estimated through a per-link hash whose salt changes every UTC day, is kept only in the cache and is deleted about an hour after that day ends. Bots are filtered out — link-preview crawlers, scripts posing as browsers, scanners on cloud servers and repeat clicks — so your numbers are not inflated by anything that isn't a person.

Link passwords are hashed with bcrypt. API keys and the one-time tokens sent by email are stored hashed too, so a copy of the database does not hand over access to any account.

Who you are dealing with

The guides on this site are written by Ananya Sharma; each author's page lists everything they have written, and every guide carries the date it was last revised.

Xlyl is operated by Soqode Digital Pvt Ltd.

Questions about the service, your account or your data go to contact@xlyl.link. Abusive links go through the report form instead, which reaches the administrators directly. The privacy policy explains who is responsible for the data this instance holds, and the terms set out what is and is not promised.

How it is built

Xlyl runs on Node.js, MySQL and Redis.

There is a REST API for everything the interface can do, so it can sit behind your own tooling rather than being another dashboard someone has to remember to open.

Reporting abuse

Short links get abused for spam and phishing. Targets are checked against banned domains and hosts, and anyone can report a link — reports go straight to the administrators and abusive links are removed.

If you want to leave

A service you cannot leave is a dependency, so leaving is kept simple. Your account page downloads a CSV of your links, and each link's clicks download as a CSV from the dashboard or through the API.

Links you put on a domain you own can keep their addresses elsewhere: recreate them — the same aliases and destinations — on the new service, then move the domain's DNS and HTTPS there.

What we will not do

Short and worth stating plainly, because these are the decisions that get quietly reversed at other services:

• No advertising or interstitial between a click and its destination.
• No visitor identity. Clicks are recorded in full detail, but no IP address is stored with them, and the visitor hash is different on every link and changes every day.
• No affiliate codes on your links. The operator's codes are added only to links the site's administrators create to Creative Market, MyFonts or ThemeForest; everyone else's links go exactly where they were saved.
• No selling or sharing of link or click data with anyone.
• No feature withheld to create a paid tier. There is one tier and it is free.

What you actually get

The product is one dashboard. A box to shorten a link, the figures that tell you whether anything is happening, and a table of everything you have made — each row one click from its statistics, its QR code, or an edit.

There is no onboarding sequence, no upgrade prompt and no feature that greys out. If you want the detail, the features page lists every option a link can carry and the exact limits that apply.