Home > Lifestyle > Internet

Snippet: Quickly Shorten Links from Address Bar

By Abhiroop Basu

With so many blogs and websites floating around on my address bar everyday, I find myself sending more and more “shortened” URLs to my friends. Generally the process is a bit of a pain as I have to first I have to copy the URL from the address bar, then I need to go to a URL shortening website (such as bit.ly), then I need to paste the URL into the input field and finally I receive a shortened URL.

To cut down on all these steps, all you have to do is type in “bit.ly/” or “j.mp/” before the URL in the address bar.

So, for example if the URL is “http://twitter.com” you would type in “bit.ly/http://twitter.com” or “j.mp/http://twitter.com”.

chrome - address_bar

Then hit the Enter key.

Depending on whether you used “bit.ly/” or “j.mp/” you will be taken to the respective page from where you can copy the shortened URL.

bit.ly - shortened
j.mp - shortened

That’s it! You are now free to share the shortened URL.

Snippet is a short tip/trick or just a quick fix for a certain issue that we discover from time to time. Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed for more up to date tutorials/tips/tricks.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Abhiroop Basu Avatar
Abhiroop Basu
Abhiroop Basu is an opinionated tech and digital media blogger. As a doe-eyed twenty-something, he started his first blog TechComet to comment on anything tech-related that caught his omniscient eye.

Read next

Roughly 99 per cent of international internet traffic runs through about 550 undersea cables — and a handful of private companies including Google, Meta and Amazon now own or lease a growing share of them
Content and cloud networks now account for three-quarters of used international bandwidth, while Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon own, co-own or buy capacity on a growing share of the 600-plus submarine cable systems carrying over 99 per cent of data between countries, a private map hidden below the wireless internet
Wi-Fi doesn't actually slow down when a café gets crowded — the signal is fine, but every device has to wait its turn to speak on the same frequency, and the polite queuing is what you feel as lag
Wi-Fi doesn’t actually slow down when a café gets crowded — the signal is fine, but every device has to wait its turn to speak on the same frequency, and the polite queuing is what you feel as lag
In 1988, a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student named Robert Morris released a self-replicating program to measure the size of the internet — within hours it had crashed roughly 6,000 of the 60,000 machines then online, and computer security became a field
In 1988, a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student named Robert Morris released a self-replicating program to measure the size of the internet — within hours it had crashed roughly 6,000 of the 60,000 machines then online, and computer security became a field
In July 2026, Psy’s Gangnam Style passed six billion YouTube views, fourteen years after its horse-riding dance became the platform’s first billion-view video and long after engineers had replaced a counter designed to stop at 2,147,483,647
Intricate network of tree roots and moss on a forest hillside, showcasing nature's resilience.
Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots
Close-up of glowing jellyfish swimming gracefully in deep green ocean waters.
A species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back to a juvenile polyp stage when injured or starving, effectively restarting its life cycle, and biologists have so far failed to identify any natural limit to how many times it can do this.
Elderly man with beard and bandana, reacting to smartphone while seated indoors.
A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram
A lively view of Hollywood Boulevard with iconic landmarks and busy street life under a clear sky.
The Hollywood sign originally read HOLLYWOODLAND when it was built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a housing development, and it was only meant to stand for 18 months, but nobody ever got around to taking it down and the city eventually adopted it as a landmark