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 the Links tab, 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.