If you’re attentive, you might have noticed I already have a URL shortener at go.eartharoid.me.
This was originally a YOURLS instance until I made a custom solution with Vercel and Firebase/Firestore in January 2021.
^ The landing page of the 2021 version
I made the Vercel-Firebase URL shortener because I wanted something fast and serverless, but I still wanted the API, admin UI, and analytics that YOURLS had. It worked well, except that Vercel’s caching made the management, preview, and stats pages almost useless. This was probably an easy fix, but I didn’t know how to do it and I gave up quickly.
Less than 18 months later, my custom and serverless URL shortener had redirected over 5000 requests from 3000 visitors. Unfortunately, all of the analytical data stored poorly in Firestore caused my once speedy service to become extremely sluggish.
I don’t know why, but on Monday (09/05/2022) I was looking at domains again, and a few hours later I bought lnk.earth.
After saying goodbye to my money and earlier experiencing the slowness of the existing shortener, I decided, without much thought, to make a new shortener.
I chose Workers because I hadn’t used it for anything yet and I wanted to try it. Paired with KV, Workers are extremely fast and require little code to get things done. As I was aiming to get it done in a day (because it was unplanned), I didn’t make an admin UI or even an API. I don’t shorten URLs very often, and I don’t need to do it quickly. Cloudflare’s dashboard and the CLI are both easy ways to manage the KV database. I may add an API if my needs change in the future.
I already use Umami on my websites, and I realised it is perfect for this project. This made analytics very easy, I just needed to send the request data to Umami.
^ The Umami page for lnk.earth
The result
My new Cloudflare Workers and KV shortener is incredibly fast, and with Umami for analytics, it should stay fast.
Requests were taking at least 2 seconds to be redirected, sometimes up to 7 seconds. Now it takes around 0.1 seconds (as low as 87ms).
^2021 version of the preview page
vs
^2022 version of the preview page
To conclude, my URL shortener:
- is 25-70x faster
- has a new domain -
lnk.earth- so URLs are actually short (althoughgo.eartharoid.mealso works) - has better analytics with Umami
- has a cleaner preview page
- was (mostly) made in less than a day
You can view the source code on GitHub.
Photo by Dynamic Wang on Unsplash.