By country · Europe
Best URL shortener in United Kingdom
Short links for United Kingdom: a gc.mw link is 10 characters, .uk sets a different floor, and 160 characters is what one English message holds.
- ISO code
- GB
- ccTLD
- .uk
- Calling code
- +44
- Currency
- GBP
- Standard offset
- UTC+00:00
- One message
- 160 chars
What geo rules and the country column match on.
Most names sit under .co.uk.
What a card and a click-to-chat link carry.
pound sterling
The UTC day turns over at 00:00 local.
English sends as GSM-7.
The ISO code is GB and the ccTLD is .uk. Geo rules and the country column in analytics use GB, because that is what the edge sends. Typing UK in a geo rule matches nothing.
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 .uk costs you in characters
United Kingdom runs .uk. Registrants normally sit under .co.uk, which is 6 characters before a single letter of name is added. A one-letter .co.uk domain is therefore 7 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 United Kingdom
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 |
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. 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 160-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. United Kingdom is at UTC+00:00, so the UTC day turns over at 00:00 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. United Kingdom 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 United Kingdom appears in your breakdown as GB. 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 United Kingdom
United Kingdom maps to the USD price book, the default one, charged through razorpay-international. Local currency here is the pound sterling, 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 +44
A digital business card stores its phone number in international form, so a United Kingdom number is written +44 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/44. Type a local number beginning with a zero, set 44 as the country code, and the leading zero is stripped for you.
More about United Kingdom
GB is the code, .uk is the domain
The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for the United Kingdom is GB. The ccTLD is .uk. Both are correct and they do not match, which trips people up constantly.
Analytics store the ISO code, so British traffic appears as GB. Geo rules match the same string, so a rule written for UK matches nothing at all and fails silently, sending everyone to the default destination while looking correctly configured. If a geo rule is not firing, this is the first thing to check.
.co.uk against .uk
Britain is one of the countries where the registry sells directly under the ccTLD as well as under .co.uk. The suffix .uk is three characters against six for .co.uk, which halves the floor on a short British domain.
Recognition pulls the other way. A .co.uk still reads as a British business to a British reader in a way that .uk has not entirely earned, so the shorter option costs a little trust for a lot of characters. It is a real trade rather than an obvious win.
On UTC for part of the year
Britain sits on UTC in winter and an hour ahead in summer. For half the year the analytics day and the local day are the same day, which is a genuine convenience, and for the other half a click after 01:00 local belongs to the previous UTC day. Comparing a June week against a January week means comparing two slightly different definitions of a day.
English keeps the full message
English needs nothing outside the GSM 7-bit alphabet, so a British SMS holds 160 characters rather than 70. In a market where messages are metered per part, that makes the link length argument weaker here than almost anywhere else. Say that plainly: if you are sending English SMS to British numbers, ten characters against fourteen is not going to change your bill. Use a branded domain instead and buy the recognition.
Questions people ask about short links in United Kingdom
What is the shortest URL shortener available in United Kingdom?
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 United Kingdom?
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 United Kingdom.
How many characters does a link cost in a English SMS?
A English message uses GSM-7, so one message holds 160 characters. A 10-character gc.mw link leaves 150 for words. Once a message runs long it is split into parts of 153 characters and you pay per part.
Which currency am I billed in from United Kingdom?
USD. United Kingdom uses the default price book, so paid plans are charged in USD through razorpay-international. The local currency here is the pound sterling, and your bank does the conversion at its own rate.
How do I send United Kingdom traffic to a different page?
Add a geo rule with the country code GB. The redirect layer reads the country from the edge, matches it against the rule and records the click with the variant geo:GB, so you can see how much of the traffic the rule caught. Geo rules are a Business and Team feature.
Other countries in Europe
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.