Short Links
People screenshot links, print them on packaging and paste them into decks you will never see again. So the short URL stays fixed and everything behind it — destination, rules, expiry — stays editable.
One slug printed everywhere. Point it at a new collection next season and every printed copy follows.
Issued on a domain you own and verified, so the link carries your brand instead of ours.
With a device rule attached: iOS goes to the App Store, Android to Google Play, everything else to your website.
Naming
The part after the slash is yours to choose, and so is the part before it.
Slugs accept letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, and must start and end with a letter or number. They are checked for uniqueness per domain, so the same slug can exist on paddek.com and on your own domain without colliding. Leave the field empty and a short random slug is generated.
A reserved list keeps product routes such as /pricing and /login from being claimed, which is what stops a customer link from shadowing a page on the site.
Add a domain or subdomain you control, verify it with a TXT record or a CNAME to a target under cname.paddek.com issued for that domain alone, and issue links on it. The dashboard shows the exact DNS values and re-checks them on demand.
Customer domains serve links and Bio Pages only. The dashboard and admin area are never served on your brand, so a verified domain cannot become a way into the product itself.
Editing
This is the reason short links exist as a product rather than a script.
Editing a destination rewrites where the link points, not the link itself. The short URL, its QR code and its analytics history all carry on unchanged, and the resolver cache is invalidated on write so the next visitor gets the new destination rather than a stale one.
Redirects
Most shorteners hard-code one. The status code affects caching, SEO and whether a POST survives, so it is a per-link setting.
The default. Browsers do not cache it, so a destination change takes effect immediately for everyone, including people who clicked the link yesterday.
Passes ranking signals and is aggressively cached by browsers. Use it when the destination is genuinely permanent — a cached 301 can outlive your ability to change it.
Like 302 but the request method and body are preserved, which matters when the short link is the target of a POST.
The permanent counterpart of 307. Method-preserving and cached.
Attribution
Store the five UTM fields on the link instead of pasting them into a destination you may later change.
The builder takes utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content. They are merged into the destination at redirect time, so a destination that already has a query string keeps it, and a targeting rule that sends someone somewhere else still carries the campaign tags.
A utm_ parameter on the short URL itself fills in any field the link leaves empty — it is recorded against the click and forwarded to the destination — so handing partners ?utm_source=partner-a reports them apart without a link each. Where both carry a value the link’s own wins: a visitor cannot overwrite the owner’s attribution.
Resolved destination
Targeting
Rules are evaluated in the order you arrange them and the first match wins. Anyone who matches nothing gets the default destination.
Visitors from DE and AT go to the German storefront.
Mobile and tablet go to the app install page; desktop to the web app.
iOS to the App Store, Android to Google Play.
An Accept-Language starting with fr goes to the French landing page.
Traffic arriving from a partner site lands on a co-branded page.
During the sale window the link opens the sale page, then reverts.
Country, region and city come from the edge that fronts the app. When the request carries no geo headers the fields stay empty and a country rule simply does not match — nothing is guessed.
Access
Three ways to make a public URL less than fully public.
The visitor sees a password screen before the redirect happens.
The password is hashed with bcrypt, never stored in plaintext, and never exposed by the API. A correct entry sets a short-lived cookie for that link only, and attempts are rate limited.
The link stops working at a date and time you choose.
Choose what happens afterwards: return 404, show a message you write, or redirect somewhere else — an archive page, the new campaign, your homepage.
The link disables itself once it has been used a set number of times.
Useful for limited offers and one-time handovers. When the limit is reached the link is switched off and later visitors get the disabled page rather than the destination.
An interstitial showing the destination before the visitor continues.
Turn it on for links you post publicly, where showing people exactly where they are going is worth the extra tap.
Offline
Generated from the short URL, so the code keeps working after you change the destination.
A scan is recorded as a QR click rather than a web click, so you can see how a printed campaign performed on its own instead of having it blend into your social traffic. Over the wire the two are identical, so the code we generate carries a marker that the redirect engine reads and then drops — a code made elsewhere from the bare short URL still resolves, but it arrives as an ordinary click.
Next
The demo runs the real dashboard interface on clearly-labelled sample data.