If you’re sharing bit.ly/xk2r9p with your audience, you’re sending them somewhere with Bitly’s name on it, not yours. That link could belong to anyone. It carries no brand signal, and people have learned — with some justification — to be suspicious of random short links.
A custom domain changes this. Instead of bit.ly/something, your links look like go.yourbrand.com/something. Same short link, same analytics, same redirect — but your brand is on it, not ours.
This guide walks through how to set that up on Links on Link, and explains the underlying concepts so you’re not just following steps blindly.
A short link service like Links on Link runs on our infrastructure. By default, links use a domain we provide. A custom domain lets you point your own domain (or a subdomain of your main domain) at our infrastructure, so your links appear to come from you.
The technical mechanism is a DNS record — specifically a CNAME record that points your custom domain to our servers. When someone clicks go.yourbrand.com/abc, their browser looks up go.yourbrand.com, finds the CNAME pointing to our infrastructure, and we handle the redirect from there.
If you don’t have a domain already, you’ll need to register one. You can register a completely separate short domain (something like ybn.link or your brand abbreviated), or use a subdomain of a domain you already own.
Using a subdomain is the simpler option for most people. If your website is at yourbrand.com, you can set up go.yourbrand.com or links.yourbrand.com and use that for your short links. You manage it all through your existing domain registrar without buying anything new.
A dedicated short domain looks cleaner if you use links heavily — it’s shorter and reads well in print. But for most use cases, a subdomain works just fine.
go for go.yourbrand.com)DNS changes propagate across the internet. It can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. While it’s propagating, the verification in your Links on Link settings will show “pending” — that’s normal, just check back.
In Links on Link, go to Settings → Custom Domains and add your domain. Once the CNAME is set up and DNS has propagated, you can verify the domain. Verification confirms that the DNS record is correctly pointing to our infrastructure.
After verification, you can activate the domain. From that point, any short link you create can use that domain. You can also set a domain as your default, so new links automatically use it without you having to select it each time.
The last part of a short URL — the bit after the slash — is the slug. By default, Links on Link generates a random short slug for each link. But you can set a custom slug instead.
Custom slugs make links readable and memorable. go.yourbrand.com/summer-sale tells your audience something. go.yourbrand.com/xk2r9p tells them nothing.
You can set a custom slug when you create a link. Slugs need to be unique within a domain — two links on the same domain can’t have the same slug — but the same slug can exist across different domains.
You can have up to 3 custom domains on the Creator plan. That’s usually more than enough. If you need more, the Pro plan has higher limits.
Custom domains work for both short links and link-in-bio pages. A page at go.yourbrand.com/me is fully valid. Pages on your custom domain look considerably more professional than pages on our default domain.
SSL is handled automatically. Your custom domain will have HTTPS from the start. There’s nothing to configure there.
Changing a domain doesn’t break existing links. Links created on a domain stay on that domain. If you add a second domain and set it as default, existing links on the first domain still work.
Bitly charges $29/month (their Growth plan) to use a custom domain. Rebrandly allows one custom domain on their free plan but limits you to 10 branded links per month before you hit a wall. Linktree doesn’t offer custom domains until their higher tiers.
On Links on Link, custom domains are included in the Creator plan at $6/month, with up to 3 domains. That’s not a special feature or an upgrade — it’s just part of the product.