Teams switch shorteners for cost, features, or ownership. The risk is not the new tool—it is the thousands of old links living in PDFs, decks, packaging, and autoresponders you forgot existed.
Step 1: Export what you can
From your current provider, export active links, destinations, creation dates, and tags. If export is limited, scrape your internal wiki, email templates, and CMS for known domains.
Step 2: Classify by risk
- High risk: print, billboards, tattoos (yes, it happens), conference badges
- Medium: evergreen blog posts, YouTube descriptions, top social pins
- Low: one-off tweets, expired campaigns
High-risk links may need parallel running: keep old domain resolving while you phase in new short URLs on new creative only.
Step 3: Match or remap
If you own the custom domain on the old tool, you may be able to repoint DNS to a new provider—preserving every legacy path. If not, you create new short links and accept that old URLs die unless the old vendor keeps redirecting.
When you cannot preserve paths, publish a single “we moved” page on the old domain if you still control it.
Step 4: Bulk recreate in Octilink
Recreate high-traffic destinations first with consistent slugs where possible (/guide, /pricing). Document a mapping sheet: old URL → new URL. Share it with anyone who runs paid ads or affiliate programs.
Step 5: Communicate once, clearly
Newsletter line: “We updated our short links; if a bookmark fails, hit our site footer.” Creators: pin a comment on top videos. Sales: snippet in email signatures.
Step 6: Freeze the old habit
Disable old tool seats so nobody generates fresh links there. One source of truth stops the migration from restarting itself.
Why teams pick Octilink for the landing zone
Speed for day-to-day creation, room to grow into saved links and analytics when you want them, and less ceremony than enterprise suites. Migration is painful enough—the daily workflow afterward should not be.
Reality check
You will not catch every link. Plan for stragglers: a site search, a contact form, and a habit of checking 404 logs on your main domain for odd referrers.
Migration is inventory plus discipline. Do those two and you switch tools without switching off revenue.