Migrating from Bitly: what moves, what cannot, and the safe order

Start with the sentence that decides the whole plan: a bit.ly link can only ever be redirected by Bitly. There is no export format, no transfer request and no technical trick that changes this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is describing recreation, not migration.

That leaves two genuinely different situations, and they need opposite plans.

Situation one: your links are on bit.ly

Every printed code, every posted link and every QR pointing at bit.ly/something stays dependent on Bitly for as long as you need it to work. Cancelling the account is what kills them, whenever you do it.

So the plan is not a migration. It is a cutover with a long tail:

1. 1

   Export everything before you touch anything

   Links with their destinations, and click history. Both live only in your account until you take a copy, and the history is not recoverable afterwards at any price.

2. 2

   Sort by clicks in the last 90 days

   Almost every list has a short head and a long dead tail. The head is what you will recreate carefully; the tail is mostly links nobody has followed in a year.

3. 3

   Recreate the head as new links with the same destinations

   New short links, new codes. Use the same aliases where they are free, so anything you republish reads the same as before.

4. 4

   Change what you control, and only that

   Website, email templates, social bios, signatures, new print runs. Anything already in the world stays on the old link.

5. 5

   Keep the old account alive while the old links still get traffic

   Watch the click numbers on the Bitly side monthly. Cancel when they reach a level you are willing to lose, not on the day you finish rebuilding.

Situation two: your links are on your own domain

This one is clean, and it is the reason to have a custom domain in the first place.

go.yourbrand.com/spring resolves through whichever provider your DNS points at. Recreate every code here first, then repoint the CNAME. The same URLs keep working, every printed code stays valid, and the switch is a DNS change rather than a rebuild.

The order is not negotiable. Recreate, verify, then repoint. Repointing first gives you a window where every link on the domain returns a 404.

1. 1

   Add the domain here and verify it while it is still live there

   A CNAME and a TXT record. Verification checks both. Your existing links keep resolving through the old provider throughout, because the CNAME has not moved yet.

2. 2

   Import every code with its destination

   Post to the bulk endpoint with the batch domain set once, up to 1,000 rows per request, each row carrying the URL and the alias that must be preserved.

3. 3

   Read the per-row results

   Rows fail independently and each says why. Reserved words and brand-protected aliases are the two you will hit; both are refused by name rather than silently altered.

4. 4

   Spot-check, then repoint the CNAME

   Open twenty of the recreated codes against the new host directly before the DNS change. Then move the CNAME and watch traffic arrive.

Reshaping the export

A Bitly export is not the shape the bulk endpoint takes, and the reshaping is where mistakes hide.

Field	From the export	Notes
url	Long URL column	Must be http or https; anything else is rejected
alias	The code after the slash	Only for a custom domain migration; on gc.mw it is a Pro feature
title	Title column	Optional, for your own organisation
tags	Tags column	Lowercased on import; up to 20 per link

Two things to check before sending. Duplicate aliases inside one batch are refused with a message naming the earlier row, so deduplicate first. And destinations that are themselves shortened links — a bit.ly pointing at a t.co pointing at your page — should be flattened to the real destination now, while you can see them.

What you will not be able to compare

Click totals. Not because either system is wrong, but because they count different things. We do not record link-preview crawlers at all, and we separate identified bots out of every audience breakdown. A number that drops on the day you switch is usually the preview traffic disappearing, not your audience.

Give it a month and compare shapes rather than totals: the hour-of-day curve, the referrer-type mix, the country split. Those transfer meaningfully. A single number does not.

What changes afterwards

Codes get shorter — four random characters on a paid plan against seven, which matters most in a QR code, where fewer characters means fewer modules and bigger squares at the same printed size. Analytics retention runs 30 days on Free, a year on Pro and three years on Business and Team.

And the domain itself is the part worth keeping regardless of provider: with a custom domain, the next migration after this one is a DNS change rather than a rebuild.