Zero Width Shortener
Shorten URLs with zero width characters, instead of .
Frequently Asked Questions
ZWS uses zero width characters instead of the typical alphanumeric ones that URL shorteners use. When rendered, these characters appear invisible, but they're still there, which means that ZWS is able to use them to encode information about your URL.
About us
Hi, I'm Jonah, the creator of ZWS. I hacked together the first version of ZWS back in 2019, mostly just to see if the concept would actually work. It turns out it did work, and since then we've shortened a few hundred thousand URLs, and handled redirects millions of times.
Over time, ZWS has gone through a lot of design iterations, on both the frontend and backend. If you're curious about how ZWS works internally, feel free to look at the source code on GitHub.