Getting started with Qurly: your first short link, QR code, and landing page in five minutes

This guide walks through the first five things to set up after you create a Qurly account. By the end, you’ll have a working short link, a customised QR code, a Qurly-hosted landing page, real-time click analytics, and (optionally) a teammate invited to your workspace. Total time is about five minutes if you don’t stop to read sidebars, and about fifteen if you do.

If you haven’t signed up yet, do that first. Free plan, no credit card.

1. Create your first short link

After signing in, you’ll land on the Links dashboard. Click Create link in the top right.

You’ll see two fields that matter and a few that don’t:

• Destination URL — where the short link should send visitors. Paste in any URL.
• Custom short code (optional) — the slug after the domain, e.g. acme.li/spring-sale. Leave blank for a random code, or type your own to make it human-readable.

Click Create. You’re done. The Links dashboard now shows your new short link with a click counter (currently zero), the destination, and a copy button.

One concrete recommendation: always pick a custom short code if you’re sharing the link with humans. acme.li/spring-sale consistently outperforms acme.li/x7Ap2 in click-through. We have a longer post on this if you want the full reasoning.

2. Generate a customised QR code

QR codes in Qurly aren’t a separate product — they’re attached to a link. Open the link you just created (click its row in the dashboard), then click the QR Code tab.

By default you’ll see a black-on-white QR pointing at your short link. The QR builder lets you customise:

• Foreground colour — the dark squares (modules)
• Background colour — the light squares
• Module shape — square (default), rounded, dots, gapped, or vertical/horizontal bars
• Corner shape — the three big squares in the corners can match modules or be styled separately
• Logo overlay — drop in a square PNG or SVG; we automatically pick a margin that keeps the QR scannable
• Frame — a “Scan me” border that lifts scan rates noticeably for first-time scanners

Aim for high contrast — black on white is safest, but any combination with at least 30% luminance difference will scan reliably. If you want to test from print distance, generate it, print at intended size, then scan from arm’s length using both an iOS Camera and a generic Android scanner.

Click Save, then Download for PNG or SVG export.

3. Add a Qurly-hosted landing page

If your destination is somewhere you don’t fully control — a guest WiFi page, a third-party event, a pop-up — you can have your short link land on a Qurly-hosted landing page instead of an external URL.

From the link’s edit screen, click Landing page in the side panel and toggle it on. You’ll see a block editor:

• Heading — the page title
• Paragraph — body text
• Button — a CTA that links anywhere
• Image — upload from your asset library, your computer, or generate one with AI on Business+ plans
• vCard — a digital business card that exports a .vcf to the visitor’s contacts
• YouTube / X (Twitter) / TikTok embeds

Drag blocks to reorder. Click any block to edit. Hit Save and your short link now lands on a Qurly-hosted page rendered on its own subdomain (or your custom domain if you’ve set one up — see the branded domain guide).

Pro tip: if you’re a creator or freelancer, the Link in bio preset gives you a pre-built block layout (heading, bio, four buttons, vCard) that you can swap your details into in under a minute.

4. Watch real-time click analytics

Open the Analytics tab on your link. As soon as your link gets its first click, you’ll see:

• Total clicks + click trend (last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, depending on your plan)
• Geographic distribution — clicks by country and (on Business+ plans) by city
• Device & OS breakdown — iOS / Android / desktop, with browser detail
• Referrers — which sites or platforms drove the click
• Time-of-day patterns — when the link gets the most engagement

Three things to know about Qurly analytics:

1. Privacy: IP addresses are hashed at the edge before any storage. We can tell you “X clicks from London” because the hash includes a coarse geo lookup, but we never store the raw IP.
2. Retention depends on your plan: 7 days on Free, 30 on Pro, 90 on Business, 1 year on Scale, 5 years on Enterprise. Older data isn’t deleted catastrophically — it’s archived and remains restorable on upgrade.
3. Real-time: most metrics update within 30 seconds of the click. The geographic and device data takes another ~2 minutes to populate after the first click.

5. Invite a teammate (optional, but probably worth it)

Even if you’re a team of one today, future-you wants the org structure to be right. Go to Settings → Organization → Members, click Invite member, and add an email + role.

Roles in Qurly:

• Owner — full control. Can delete the org. Every business org has at least one.
• Admin — can do anything except delete the org or change billing
• Editor — can create and edit links, QR codes, and landing pages, but can’t manage members or settings
• Viewer — read-only, useful for stakeholders who want to see analytics but not change anything

Your invitee gets an email with an accept link. They sign in with whatever method they prefer (password, Google, Apple, GitHub, phone OTP) and they’re in.

You can have unlimited orgs, by the way — a personal one auto-created on signup, plus any number of business orgs you create or get invited to. The org switcher is in the top-left of the dashboard.

Quick checklist

You shipped if you have all of these:

• One short link with a human-readable slug
• One customised QR code (downloaded as PNG or SVG)
• One Qurly-hosted landing page (or, if your destination is external, a confirmed working redirect)
• At least one click on your link, visible in analytics
• (Optional) one teammate invited

That’s the foundation. From here, the most common next steps are:

• Set up a branded short domain — acme.li instead of qurly.dev
• Plan a measurable QR campaign — when you’re shipping more than one QR
• The blog — patterns and tactics for specific campaign types

If you get stuck on any step, the help center has the most common gotchas, and we read every email at hello@qurly.dev within a business day.