Who might have guessed that one of the web’s more convenient features – the ability to shorten extensively long URLs into just a few characters – is actually making the internet slower?
The Dutch start-up company WatchMouse monitored the 14 most popular URL shorteners, for 30 days, from February 14th to March 16th, and found just that. URL shorteners, it seems, cause additional load time for a page to fully load.
The company checked each URL shortener every five minutes from its 44 monitoring stations around the world, and measured only the redirection. The redirection was expected to be done, error-free, within eight seconds. Any time over that was recorded.
The URL shorteners it monitored included Bit.ly, Fb.me, Tiny.url, and Youtu.be.
WatchMouse found that on Fb.me, the load time was an additional two seconds to the page load time after a click on the link. That may not seem like much, but added up over a few million clicks, and it’s astronomical. Indeed, quite a few other URL shorteners were not far behind, with many taking one and a half seconds longer to load, which WatchMouse says is “way too much for a URL redirection.”
Goo.gl and Twt.tl managed to score perfectly, which meant that they never exceeded the eight second marker. In close second and third were Binged.it, and Is.gd.
The company also pointed out that another way in which URL shorteners are less than ideal is that they add an additional single point of failure, meaning that there is one more place for the link to become corrupted and fail, and therefore not work.
The study also found that many of the URL shorteners did not bother to optimize their name servers for international use. This means it will take the URL shortener a full half-second longer just to look up the IP address that is needed for a browser to retrieve a web page. This means while some countries, like the US, may be experiencing fast page load times, other countries on the other side of the world may be experiencing slight delays due to this issue.
So much importance does WatchMouse give this issue that it has actually set up a website devoted to continuing to monitor URL shortening websites.
WatchMouse was able to point out some positive aspects of URL shorteners, some of which many are well aware, such as that they make a URL shorter. But they also pointed out that URL shorteners allow sites to track and analyze clicks on a specific short URL, and also that some (like Twt.tl) also analyze the target site for harmful website code or phishing attempts.
Back in August of last year, Tech Crunch’s Erick Schonfeld found that Ow.ly and Bit.ly were the fastest, most reliable URL shorteners. What was in question was the time it took to load a page, and its uptime (similar to the WatchMouse study). The shortener Tr.im came in dead-last for the same factors.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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