By country · Africa
Best URL shortener in Nigeria
Short links for Nigeria: a gc.mw link is 10 characters, .ng sets a different floor, and 70 characters is what one Yoruba message holds.
- ISO code
- NG
- ccTLD
- .ng
- Calling code
- +234
- Currency
- NGN
- Standard offset
- UTC+01:00
- One message
- 70 chars
What geo rules and the country column match on.
Most names sit under .com.ng.
What a card and a click-to-chat link carry.
Nigerian naira
The UTC day turns over at 01:00 local.
Yoruba sends as UCS-2.
How long a link is, counted
A gc.mw link is the host, a slash and a code. The host is five characters. A code is 5 characters on the free tier and 4 on a paid plan, drawn from a 58-character alphabet with no zero, capital O, capital I or lowercase L in it, so nobody has to guess which character they are reading. That makes a paid link 10 characters and a free one 11.
| Host | Service | Characters | With the slash | Registry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| t.ly | T.LY | 4 | 5 | .ly, Libya |
| v.gd | v.gd | 4 | 5 | .gd, Grenada |
| gc.mw | gc.mw | 5 | 6 | .mw, Malawi |
| is.gd | is.gd | 5 | 6 | .gd, Grenada |
| bit.ly | Bitly | 6 | 7 | .ly, Libya |
| cutt.ly | Cutt.ly | 7 | 8 | .ly, Libya |
| rebrand.ly | Rebrandly | 10 | 11 | .ly, Libya |
| tinyurl.com | TinyURL | 11 | 12 | .com |
Two hosts on that list are shorter than ours and one ties. We are not going to pretend otherwise. What decides the length of a real link is the code, and a four-character code on a five-character host beats a longer code on a shorter one.
What .ng costs you in characters
Nigeria runs .ng. Registrants normally sit under .com.ng, which is 7 characters before a single letter of name is added. A one-letter .com.ng domain is therefore 8 characters, against five for gc.mw. That is the floor, and it assumes a single-letter name that almost certainly is not available.
What a message holds in Nigeria
One SMS carries 140 octets. Text that fits the GSM 7-bit alphabet packs seven bits to a character and gets 160 of them. One character outside that alphabet switches the whole message to UCS-2 at sixteen bits a character, and the limit drops to 70. That single rule decides whether a link is a rounding error in your message or a fifth of it.
| Language | Encoding | One message | Left after a link | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | GSM-7 | 160 | 150 | every letter it needs is in the GSM alphabet |
| Yoruba | UCS-2 | 70 | 60 | outside the GSM alphabet: á and the tone marks under vowels |
The verdict in that table is computed, not asserted. Each row runs a real word of the language through the GSM 03.38 table: your short link, Yorùbá. Beyond one message the text is split into parts of 153 or 67 characters, and every part is billed. A 10-character link against a 70-character ceiling is the difference between one part and two.
The day your clicks are filed under
Click rollups are keyed to the UTC day and the hour breakdown is UTC hours. Nigeria is at UTC+01:00, so the UTC day turns over at 01:00 local time. Anything clicked after that is filed under the next day in the daily chart even though it is still the same evening where you are. Nigeria keeps a single standard offset, so there is no internal split to reason about.
Country itself is read at the edge and stored as the ISO code, so Nigeria appears in your breakdown as NG. That is the same string a geo rule matches on, which is deliberate: the value you read in analytics is the value you type in a rule.
Paying from Nigeria
Nigeria maps to the USD price book, the default one, charged through razorpay-international. Local currency here is the Nigerian naira, and the conversion happens at your bank, not at ours. Nothing on the free tier depends on where you are. Anonymous links last 30 days and a free account keeps them for 365 days from any country.
A card and a chat link with +234
A digital business card stores its phone number in international form, so a Nigeria number is written +234 followed by the national number. The vCard file uses the same form, which is what makes a scanned card dial correctly from a phone bought anywhere else. The click-to-chat builder takes the same number and produces a link that starts wa.me/234. Type a local number beginning with a zero, set 234 as the country code, and the leading zero is stripped for you.
More about Nigeria
Two limits in one campaign
Nigerian business runs in English, which fits the GSM 7-bit alphabet and gives a full 160 characters. Yoruba does not. Its acute vowels and the marks written under vowels are outside the alphabet, so a Yoruba message drops to 70 characters. Hausa and Igbo carry letters outside it too.
That means a bilingual campaign has two budgets for the same content, and the local-language version is the one that decides how many message parts you pay for. A ten-character link is a sixteenth of an English message and a seventh of a Yoruba one.
The domain floor
Nigerian registrants use .com.ng, seven characters before any name. The shortest possible Nigerian domain is eight characters, and any name worth having is longer. A five-character host is a real saving rather than a marginal one, and that is the whole reason to reach for a foreign shortener rather than a local domain.
Billed in dollars
Nigeria uses the default price book, so plans are charged in USD. The naira is the local currency and the conversion happens at your bank, which is worth knowing before comparing the listed price against a local product quoting in naira. Nothing on the free tier depends on any of that: anonymous links last 30 days and a free account keeps them for a year, from anywhere.
One offset, which helps
Nigeria keeps a single standard offset at UTC+01:00 with no seasonal change. The analytics day therefore turns over at one in the morning local, close enough to the local midnight that the daily chart reads the way you would expect. Very few large markets get that.
Questions people ask about short links in Nigeria
What is the shortest URL shortener available in Nigeria?
gc.mw is five characters, which makes a paid link 10 characters end to end and a free one 11. Two well-known hosts are shorter than five: v.gd and t.ly are four each. The honest comparison is the whole link, host plus slash plus code, because a four-character host with an eight-character code is longer than a five-character host with a four-character code.
Is there a free URL shortener for Nigeria?
Yes. Shortening without an account works from anywhere and the link lasts 30 days. A free account raises that to 365 days and gives you click analytics. Neither step asks for a card, and there is no separate signup for Nigeria.
How many characters does a link cost in a local-language Yoruba SMS?
A Yoruba message uses UCS-2, so one message holds 70 characters. A 10-character gc.mw link leaves 60 for words. Once a message runs long it is split into parts of 67 characters and you pay per part.
Which currency am I billed in from Nigeria?
USD. Nigeria uses the default price book, so paid plans are charged in USD through razorpay-international. The local currency here is the Nigerian naira, and your bank does the conversion at its own rate.
How do I send Nigeria traffic to a different page?
Add a geo rule with the country code NG. The redirect layer reads the country from the edge, matches it against the rule and records the click with the variant geo:NG, so you can see how much of the traffic the rule caught. Geo rules are a Business and Team feature.
Other countries in Africa
The questions behind this page
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Try it with your own link
Paste a long link and get a 10-character gc.mw link with a QR code. No account needed for 30 days; free forever with one.