Vanity URLs: four namespaces, one naming scheme, no regrets

Four different things get called a vanity URL, and confusing them is why naming conversations go in circles.

Form	Example	Needs	Best for
Path alias	gc.mw/menu	Pro	Anything printed, said aloud, or typed
Subdomain namespace	acme.gc.mw/spring	Pro	Grouping a brand or region without DNS
Custom domain	links.acme.com/spring	Paid plan, two DNS records	Email, and anywhere the domain itself matters
Handle	gc.mw/@priya	Free from five characters	A person or a brand's front door

They stack rather than compete. A company usually ends up with a custom domain for campaigns, a handle for each person, and path aliases inside both.

The rules that constrain the naming

Aliases run four to sixty-four characters: letters, digits, hyphens and underscores, starting and ending with a letter or digit. Uniqueness is enforced on a lowercased copy, so claiming Sale also claims sale — there is no way to end up with two links differing only in capitalisation and pointing at different places, which is a phishing technique rather than a feature.

Handles are stricter and lowercase only: one to thirty characters of lowercase letters, digits, dots and underscores, again starting and ending with a letter or digit. Five characters and up are free; shorter ones are priced by length, because there are only so many of them.

Two lists sit in front of every check. Reserved paths cover everything the application itself serves. Brand protection covers names that exist mainly to be abused, and it matches loosely — a name that merely starts or ends with a protected brand is refused, so paypal-refund fails as surely as paypal.

Naming so that it lasts

The whole discipline is one question: will this word still be true in eighteen months?

Name	Lifespan	Why
menu, careers, support, map	Indefinite	Names a function, not a moment
spring, summer	A season, reusable	Recurs with the same meaning
spring-sale-2026	One quarter	Dead in July, and says so
q3-emea-launch-v2	Already dead	Internal language on a public surface

Two rules cover almost every case.

Name the function, not the campaign. gc.mw/menu outlives every menu you will ever publish, because the short link is a pointer and the destination is the answer. gc.mw/winter-menu-2026 is a name that becomes a lie.

Never put internal vocabulary in a public URL. Region codes, quarter numbers, version suffixes and project code names tell a customer nothing and tell a competitor something. The campaign metadata belongs in UTM parameters, which travel with the click and never appear on a poster.

A scheme for a team

Aliases are first come, first served across a domain, which on a shared workspace means the good words go to whoever moves fastest unless you agree something.

1. 1

   Reserve the functional names centrally

   menu, pricing, careers, support, map, wifi, press. A dozen words, claimed once, pointed at the right pages, and never handed to a campaign.

2. 2

   Give each team a prefix for the rest

   sales-, hr-, events-. Readable, sortable in a list of a thousand links, and it prevents two people claiming the same obvious word.

3. 3

   Use random codes for anything short-lived

   A link inside one email to one segment does not need a name. Random codes are shorter, and they do not consume a word you might want later.

4. 4

   Write down what happens when a campaign ends

   Repoint, expire on a date, or leave. Decide before you print. This is the step everyone skips and the one that produces dead links two years later.

The mistake worth naming

Deleting a vanity URL when the campaign ends. It feels like tidying up. It is destroying every printed artefact that carries it, permanently, for everyone still holding one.

A link costs nothing to keep. Repoint it at the page that best matches what someone expected, and check the click numbers once a year — a retired campaign link still taking traffic is telling you something is still in circulation.

Every alias here is an ordinary branded link, so it keeps its analytics, its QR code and its editable destination. The word is the only part that is hard to change later, which is the entire reason to think about it first.