Links that never die

Links posted around the internet — in an old post, a video description, a printed flyer — tend to rot. The page they pointed at moves, gets redesigned, or disappears, and the link becomes dead: a broken page for anyone who clicks it, with no way to fix it after the fact, since the link itself was never really yours to change.

A Strands link doesn’t work that way. Every link has two parts: a slug (the fixed part people actually click) and a destination (where it currently sends people). The slug is permanent once you create it — the destination isn’t. Change what a link points to at any time, and every copy of that link already out in the world — on your page, in an old post, printed on something you can’t reprint — keeps working, now leading to the new destination instead.

Even deleting a link doesn’t leave a broken link behind. Anyone who clicks it afterward lands on your profile instead of a dead page or a generic not-found error — a Strands link never shows a 404.

An example: a /sale link

Say you create a link with the slug sale — it lives at yourname.strands.io/sale. You point it at your summer sale page and share that one link everywhere: your page, a post, a printed flyer. When summer ends, you don’t create a new link and go update every place you shared the old one — you just edit that same link’s destination to point at your fall sale page instead. Every copy of yourname.strands.io/sale already out there, flyer included, now leads to the fall sale, automatically.

Analytics that follow the link, not the destination

A link’s analytics are tied to the link itself, not to whatever it happens to point at today, so changing a destination never resets or splits its numbers. The lifetime click count on your /sale link (see Understanding your link analytics in Analytics) keeps counting straight through the change from summer sale to fall sale — one continuous history for that link, not a count that starts over every time you repoint it.

Every link also gets a short link, automatically

Every link you create also gets its own short link on strnd.io — no separate step, no extra setup. It’s generated the moment you create the link and shows on its row in Branded links, right below the full link, with its own click-to-copy button. It’s useful anywhere a long URL is awkward — a printed flyer, a video caption, spoken out loud — and it points at the same destination as the full link, updating right along with it whenever you change where that link goes.