How to migrate from Bitly to Urlik without breaking links
If you only need to protect a small set of links, this is not a full cleanout. It is a careful handoff. The goal is simple: keep the links people already trust, move the ones you control, and avoid a broken path in email, PDFs, bios, and old campaigns.
That narrower job is where many migrations go wrong. A Bitly account can hold years of history, but only a handful of links may still matter today, and those are usually the ones buried in a newsletter footer, a downloadable brochure, or a partner page you do not edit every week.
1. Confirm which Bitly links must remain live
Start with the links that have a real consequence if they fail. One broken link in a paid ad is annoying. One broken link in a print QR code can waste a whole campaign. Make a short list of evergreen links, active campaign links, and any link that sits in a template used more than once.
Keep the list small. Five links matter more than fifty forgotten ones. A founder’s bio link, a webinar registration link, and a PDF resource link often deserve more care than a batch of seasonal promotions that already ended two quarters ago.
Look inside places people forget to check. Email templates are a common one. So are downloadable assets, old slide decks, and customer support macros. If a link appears in a place you cannot update quickly, write it down now.
One useful habit is to tag each link by risk. “Public and live” needs attention first. “Internal only” can wait. “Archived but still indexed” gets a separate note, because an old Bitly link may still receive clicks long after the campaign team moved on.
2. Check whether your Bitly links can be redirected or only replaced
This is the decision point that matters most. Ask three things: do you control the destination page, do you own the branded domain, and can you set redirects at the domain level? If the answer is yes to at least one of those, your options improve fast.
When you control the destination page, you can often swap the underlying target without changing the short link users see. That is the easiest route. When you own the branded domain, you may also be able to point traffic to a new system while keeping the old short path alive. If neither is true, the link may need to stay on Bitly for now.
Here is the hard line: a link can be recreated in Urlik only if you can accept a new short link or preserve the old one through a redirect you control. If external partners have copied the Bitly URL everywhere, and you cannot change those references, do not rush to retire it. Keep the Bitly link active until the traffic drops to a level you can live with.
In practice, this is where the phrase how to migrate from Bitly to Urlik without breaking links becomes less about software and more about control. Control the domain, and you control the outcome. Lose control, and you are mostly left with replacement, not migration.
3. Rebuild the same destination structure in Urlik
For the links you can preserve, rebuild them one by one in Urlik. Match the destination URL first. Then match the slug if the old Bitly path is known and you want a similar naming pattern. A short link that once pointed to /summer-webinar should not suddenly point to a generic /promo page unless that is deliberate.
Keep the parameter logic intact. If the Bitly link carried campaign tags, source tags, or a deep link with query strings, copy those values exactly before you launch the Urlik version. One missing UTM parameter is enough to confuse a report later, and that report can waste a morning for no good reason.
Do not chase clever naming. The best slug is the one your team can recognize in six months. If the original Bitly link was shared as bit.ly/product-demo-2024, then a matching Urlik link should feel equally obvious, not like a puzzle with lowercase letters and three extra dashes.
If you want a branded path for the replacement link, pair this step with a custom short link domain. That matters more when the link will appear publicly, because a known domain gives the replacement a cleaner look and fewer questions from users who hover before clicking.
4. Preserve external links that already point to Bitly
The safest rule is boring, and that is why it works: keep the old Bitly link alive wherever people outside your team already have it. Bios, PDFs, newsletters, partner articles, and shared documents are the classic cases. If you can’t edit the source, do not fight the source.
Where you do control the reference, switch the new placement to Urlik and leave the old Bitly link alone elsewhere. That means your website button can move today, while a newsletter archive from last year stays untouched. Two paths, one outcome. No breakage.
If a partner article links to Bitly, ask for a swap only when the partner is already updating the page for another reason. Otherwise, preserve the Bitly link and make sure its destination still resolves correctly. Changing the short link in the wild often creates more work than the original migration saved.
This is also where a tracking-only preference can be useful. If the external link must stay public, you may still want a protected destination for certain materials; in that case, a separate resource with Password-Protected links can keep private assets out of casual circulation while the public Bitly link remains functional.
5. Update tracking destinations without changing the short link
Sometimes the user-facing link cannot change at all, but the team still wants Urlik for reporting or management. That is common in support articles, printed material, and older social profiles. The answer is to move the measurement logic behind the scenes while leaving the visible link structure stable.
Do this carefully. Keep the destination behavior the same, then rebuild your tracking around the Urlik link or the replacement path you now control. If your original Bitly link was doing more than redirection, such as carrying campaign context, mirror that context in Urlik before you publish anything new.
One clean example is an email signature link. People see the same click target every day, so changing it too often looks sloppy. Better to keep the visible link stable and move the reporting layer where you can manage it more easily. That way, the recipient sees a familiar path, and your team gets better data without a public reshuffle.
If you are comparing redirect behavior as part of this step, the difference between 301 vs 302 redirects can matter for how long a destination should be treated as permanent. Choose with care, especially if a link has been circulating for years and people may revisit it from old inboxes or bookmarks.
6. Test the highest-risk links in real contexts
Do not test only in a browser tab you opened yourself. Open the links from desktop, mobile, in-app browsers, and email clients. Four contexts are enough to expose most surprises. If a link works on your laptop but fails inside a social app, that is a real problem, not a minor glitch.
Check the destination parameters exactly. One character missing from a query string can send traffic to the wrong page or strip attribution data. That is the sort of error that hides in plain sight until a campaign report looks strange and no one knows why.
Preview behavior matters too. Some apps show a preview card, some do not, and some rewrite the link before opening it. Test the links where users actually click them, not just where your team pastes them. A short link can look fine and still behave badly in an embedded browser.
Use a small checklist. Open. Click. Confirm landing page. Confirm parameters. Confirm that back navigation still makes sense. Five minutes per link is enough for the high-risk set, and the bad ones usually reveal themselves fast.
If you are also worried about public trust, read are short links safe? how before you launch the replacement links broadly. A migration can work technically and still fail socially if the new link looks suspicious to people who have been trained to fear unknown short URLs.
7. Keep Bitly and Urlik running in parallel during the transition
A phased handoff is the safest path when you cannot swap everything at once. Leave legacy Bitly links in place, issue new links from Urlik, and decide link by link when a Bitly URL is safe to retire. That is not glamorous. It is practical.
Parallel running helps with old assets. A PDF distributed six months ago may still be downloaded today. A Bitly link in a podcast description may still send traffic years later. If the old link continues to matter, there is no benefit in forcing a hard cutover before the traffic proves it is dead.
Set a retirement rule. For example: if a Bitly link has no meaningful traffic for a full review period, and every active placement has been moved to Urlik, then it can be retired. If it still receives clicks from a known source, keep it live. Simple rules beat instinct here.
You can also split the work by use case. New campaigns go to Urlik first. Legacy assets stay on Bitly until the next edit cycle. If your team runs occasional experiments, A/B testing links can help separate a migration decision from a marketing test, which prevents the two from muddying each other.
There is one more practical advantage to running both systems for a while. Your team gets time to see which links people still use. That matters more than theory. A link you assumed was dead may still receive clicks from a 2022 webinar replay, and that is the kind of detail worth keeping alive before you shut anything down.