Silvercover Link Shortener

Description

Silvercover Link Shortener turns long URLs into clean, branded short links served from your own WordPress site (e.g. https://yoursite.com/go/abc123). It is ideal for sharing posts and WooCommerce products, tracking campaign performance, and keeping all your click data in your own database instead of an external shortener.

Features

  • Branded short links on your own domain (/go/your-code).
  • Automatic or custom slugs — let the plugin generate a random code, or type your own.
  • Detailed click tracking — date/time, IP address, country, browser, and referrer.
  • Per-link reports inside a dedicated admin dashboard.
  • Editor metabox — create and copy a short link directly from the post/page/product edit screen.
  • AJAX row actions — shorten or copy a link straight from the Posts/Products list, with no page reload.
  • One-click copy to clipboard (with a fallback for non-HTTPS environments).
  • Translation ready (i18n) — full text domain support with an included .pot file.
  • Secure — nonce-protected forms and manage_options capability checks (admins only).

Requirements

  • WordPress 5.6 or higher
  • PHP 7.4 or higher
  • (Optional) WooCommerce — for short links on product pages

External services

This plugin connects to the ip-api.com IP geolocation API to look up the country associated with a visitor’s IP address, so that country can be shown in the per-link click reports.

It sends the visitor’s IP address to ip-api.com every time a tracked short link is clicked (one request per click, containing only the IP address). No other data is transmitted.

This service is provided by ip-api.com: Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Screenshots

Installation

  1. Upload the silvercover-link-shortener folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, or install the plugin directly through the WordPress plugins screen.
  2. Activate Silvercover Link Shortener through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress.
  3. Go to Settings Permalinks and click Save Changes once to flush rewrite rules (required for /go/... links to work).

Upgrading

If you upgrade from an older version, deactivate and reactivate the plugin once so the database schema updates safely.

FAQ

How do I create a short link manually?

Go to Link Shortener in the admin menu, enter a target URL, optionally set a custom slug, and click Create Short Link.

How do I shorten a link for a post or product?

From the editor, use the Short Link metabox in the sidebar to generate and copy a link instantly. From the Posts/Products list, hover over any row and click Shorten link (AJAX, no reload). Once created, it becomes a Copy short link action.

How do I view click reports?

On the Link Shortener page, click Report next to any link to see every recorded click with its details.

Can I change the `/go/` base path?

Yes. Edit the following constant in the main plugin file and re-save your permalinks:

define( 'SILVLISH_SLUG_BASE', 'go' ); // e.g. change 'go' to 'link' or 's'

Does this plugin send any data to third parties?

Visitor IP addresses are sent to the free ip-api.com service for country lookup. You can disable or replace this in includes/class-links.php if you prefer not to use it.

Is the plugin translatable?

Yes, it is fully translatable. A silvercover-link-shortener.pot template is included in the languages/ folder. To regenerate it with WP-CLI:

wp i18n make-pot . languages/silvercover-link-shortener.pot

Reviews

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Contributors & Developers

“Silvercover Link Shortener” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Changelog

1.1.0

  • Added AJAX row actions to shorten and copy links from the Posts/Products list.
  • Added editor metabox for quick short link creation and copying.
  • Improved click reports UI.

1.0.0

  • Initial release.